What to Say: Keep Yourself out of Statements of Gratitude

From HBR article "Stop Making Gratitude About You" 

"There is nothing quite like ingratitude to sour an otherwise happy relationship. It’s not difficult for most of us to recall a time when we were shocked at how unappreciative and thoughtless someone was in response to our generosity. (If you are a parent, chances are you only have to think back to this morning’s breakfast.) Without some sort of acknowledgement, people very quickly stop wanting to help you. In fact, in a set of studies by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino, when someone wasn’t thanked for their help, their future rates of helping people were immediately cut in half.Gratitude is a glue that binds you and your benefactor together, allowing you to hit the same well over and over again, knowing that support won’t run dry.

At least, gratitude can be that glue if you do it right. Recent research suggests that people often make a critical mistake when expressing gratitude: They focus on how they feel — how happy they are, how they have benefited from the help — rather than focusing on the benefactor.

Researchers Sara Algoe, Laura Kurtz, and Nicole Hilaire at the University of North Carolina distinguished between two types of gratitude expressions: other-praising, which acknowledges and validates the actions of the giver, and self-benefit, which describes how the receiver is better off for having been helped. In one of their studies, couples were observed expressing gratitude to each other for something their partner had recently done for them. Their expressions were then coded for the extent to which they were other-praising or focused on self-benefit. Examples of their expressions include:

Other-praising
It shows how responsible you are…You go out of your way…I feel like you’re really good at…

Self-benefitIt let me relax…It gave me bragging rights at work…It makes me happy…

Finally, benefactors rated how happy they felt, how loving they felt toward their partner, and how responsive they felt the gratitude-giver had been. The researchers found that other-praising gratitude was strongly related to perceptions of responsiveness, positive emotion, and loving — but self-benefit gratitude was not.