An examination into the subjective experience of grace and its relation to well-being.

Grace has a rich theological context and has been conceptualized in various ways among various religious traditions, though it features most prominently within Christian traditions. While the existing empirical work has been disjointed for lack of a unifying theoretical conceptualization of grace, recent work has synthesized the varying theological and philosophical conceptualizations (Emmons et al., 2017) and suggested a more unified empirical approach. Drawing on this conceptualization, two studies were conducted using mixed-methodological approaches were used to investigate the relationship between grace and positive psychological constructs, and grace from God as a unique manifestation of grace. College students (N = 218) and Cloud Research workers (N = 220) completed online questionnaires containing measures of grace experienced, individual differences and well-being outcomes. College students described individual experiences of grace, which were examined via text analysis and word count so as to identify the frequency of various themes as a proportion of overall responses. Self-reported experiences of grace contained religious themes and mention of affective words and social processes. The experience of grace was positively associated with forgiveness, domain-specific intellectual humility about grace, religiosity, life satisfaction, and flourishing. Grace from God was reported more frequently than grace from any other source. Measurement limitations and suggestions for more empirical work are discussed.