Intensifying academic pressure in East Asian education systems has generated sustained concern about adolescent stress, socio-emotional vulnerability, and the need for evidence-based wellbeing approaches. Although gratitude interventions are widely promoted in psychology for enhancing positive emotion, relationships, and health, their cross-cultural variability highlights a pressing need for culturally sensitive models. This study synthesises two qualitative investigations that examine how Korean adolescents experience gratitude in their everyday lives, offering insights relevant to global applied psychology, positive education, and sustainable youth wellbeing.
Across five weeks of gratitude journalling in urban and rural middle schools, adolescents provided diary reflections analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The urban study developed the STARR model, comprising Sense, Transition, Affect, Recognise, and Respond. The rural study identified six superordinate themes: recognising meaning and value; cognitive reflection; emotional complexity; inhibitions in expression; prosocial motivation; and transformational self-understanding. Despite contextual variations, such as competitive academic environments in urban schools and relationally interdependent dynamics in rural communities, core processes converged.
Adolescents described gratitude not as a simple positive feeling but as a culturally shaped relational appraisal involving mixed affect, attention to effort and sacrifice, and motivation toward moral or prosocial action. Journalling acted as a practical, low-cost wellbeing tool that enabled adolescents to slow down, reinterpret everyday care, regulate emotional ambivalence, and strengthen relational awareness. Expression was often inhibited due to norms around modesty and emotional restraint, yet gratitude consistently supported empathy, responsibility, and relational repair.
Findings offer a new direction for applied psychology by demonstrating how socio-emotional interventions must be culturally attuned, contextually embedded, and developmentally sensitive. This work highlights pathways for integrating reflective practices into educational systems to promote adolescent wellbeing, relational competence, and sustainable positive development.