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

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