Key To Happiness Is Gratitude

And the headline goes on to read: And Men May Be Locked Out the result of the research seems to be that men find it harder to express gratitude and that this is actually bad for wellbeing. For me this seems to make interesting links to biblical injunctions to cultivate attitudes conducive to gratitude; indeed a eucharistic approach to life seems to be a highly commended theological mindset. And perhaps this is part of the reason why religious (and in the west this probably means those highly influenced by Judeo-Christian values) people seem to score well in wellbeing research.

The other reason that I find this intriguing is that I'm in the midst of supervising two dissertations on various aspects of male spirituality. As you might expect there are a bunch of issues orbiting this: nature vs nurture; recognising the justice and right things in feminism and yet trying to find how to affirm masculinity; stereotyping vs evidence-based research; 'feminisation' of the church and so forth (relating to the fact that there seem to be a large number of Christian women who can't find a prospective husband who shares their faith -statistically this is less likely). Key To Happiness Is Gratitude, And Men May Be Locked Out: "“The way that we get socialized as children affects what we do with our emotions as adults,” says Kashdan.
It does seem to me that men do get a bad deal in some ways in our society: “Because men are generally taught to control and conceal their softer emotions, this may be limiting their well-being.”". This does not seem to have been the case always historically (but I'm not a historian, happy to hear more on this). I wonder whether a peculiar constellation of social forces have combined in contemporary English society to bring together the worst of the masculine socialised characteristics and attitudes to mean that men are self-subverting bigtime in our society... ?