Top-Down or Bottom-Up? The Reciprocal Longitudinal Relationship Between Athlete’s Domain-General Gratitude and Sport-Specific Gratitude: A Latent Difference Score Analysis

For athletes, gratitude has received substantial attention because it promotes their optimal functioning both in the sport domain specifically and in everyday life generally. The literature has, however, been equivocal as to whether it is domain-general gratitude—from the top-down perspective—or domain-specific gratitude—from the bottom-up perspective—that comes first and directs the other. Clarifying the relationship is important for designing more precise interventions. In this regard, we conducted a three-year, six-wave prospective study for youth athletes to examine the dynamic relationship between domain-general and sport-specific gratitude. Our latent difference score analysis indicated that a reciprocal model between the two levels of gratitude was superior to other, nonreciprocal models, suggesting that athletes who had higher domain-general gratitude would increase in sport-specific gratitude, which in turn contributed to increased domain-general gratitude across the six time points over the three-year period. Our study contributes to gratitude theories by uncovering the potential directional relationship for various levels of gratitude.