Thank You Very Much!

“Thank you! Thank you, very much! Thanks!” These are the usual everyday expressions of gratitude in verbal and written form. We thank each other, sometimes for trivial things, in our daily interactions. We never think that those small words have significant impact not only on social behaviors but also on our own minds in a very meaningful way. At Indiana University, researchers divided patients starting therapy for anxiety and depression into two groups. The study group wrote a gratitude letter once a week for three weeks without the obligation to send/mail it. Researchers expected that writing gratitude letters would result in quantifiable changes in the neuronal activity in their brains. The study participants had fMRI scans of the brain three months from the beginning of the study. The letter-writing group showed neural activity in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex of their brains, which was not seen in the standard therapy...