**Original Study Aim:** In this study, we tested how gratitude-based interventions influence physiological, cognitive, and motivational responses.
**Background:** Gratitude-based interventions are effective in facilitating positive relationships and increasing life satisfaction. However, for some individuals (e.g., with high levels of depression and low trait-gratitude), gratitude expression is threatening and rarely undertaken spontaneously. To interpret the psychophysiological characteristics of gratitude expression we used the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat.
**Participants:** This dataset includes 147 participants (50% female) between the ages of 18 and 28 (M = 21.06, SD = 1.91).
**Emotions:** In this study, we elicited gratitude and neutral states.
**Physiological Signals:** We measured the psychophysiological reactivity to emotional stimuli using ECG, ICG, EDA, SBP, DBP, CO, and TPR signals. We also collected participants' valence.
**Elicitation Methods:** To elicit gratitude and neutral states, we developed a brief intervention via texting. Participants express their gratitude towards their acquaintance by sending a text message during the laboratory session (Gratitude Texting). In the control condition, we asked participants to send a neutral text message to their acquaintance with no suggestion regarding the topic. Participants prepared their messages for three minutes.
**Dataset Structure:** This directory contains 588 CSV files (four per participant) with psychophysiological information for particular subjects. Name of each of these CSV files follows a consistent naming convention, "S<study_id>_P<participant_id>_<phase_name>.csv”, where “S” stands for study, “P” for participants, and “<study_id>” & “<particpant_id>” are natural numbers indicating study and participant unique identifiers; and “<phase_name>” is the name of the phase of an experiment, including ‘Baseline', 'Gratitude', 'Neutral9'. All psychophysiological signals recorded during the experiment for each individual are available in a single CSV datafile named “ S<study_id>_P<participant_id>_All.csv”. The description of all experimental-phase labels is explained in the metadata spreadsheet.
**For more details, see our paper:** Enko, J., Behnke, M., Dziekan, M., Kosakowski, M. Kaczmarek L.D., (2021). Gratitude texting touches the heart: challenge/threat cardiovascular responses to gratitude expression predict self-initiation of gratitude interventions in daily life. *Journal of Happiness Studies**, 22,* 49–69, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00218-8
