Barbara L. Fredrickson is a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she is director of the PEP (Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology) Lab. A specialist in positive emotions, she won the first John Marks Templeton Positive Psychology Prize for original research. She contributed a chapter on how gratitude benefits human development to The […]

Robert Emmons is a psychology professor at the University of California-Davis and director of the Emmons Lab. One of his primary interests is the psychology of gratitude and how gratitude relates to human flourishing. His books include Gratitude Works!: A 21-Day Program for Creating Emotional Prosperity.

David DeSteno, a psychology professor at Northeastern University in Boston, specializes in the study of human emotions. He is working on a National Science Foundation-funded study of gratitude, trust and risk.

Read a Nov. 8, 2004, MedicineNet.com story about the health benefits of gratitude.

Read a Beliefnet column that describes Christian, Jewish and Muslim perspectives on gratitude and links to Buddhist and Hindu views.

The summer 2007 issue of Greater Good magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, surveys new research on gratitude.

The Rev. Kathy Black, a United Methodist minister, is author of A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability and Signs of Solidarity: Ministry With Persons Who Are Deaf, Deafened and Hard of Hearing. She is Kennedy Professor of Homiletics & Liturgics at Claremont School of Theology in California.

W. Daniel Blair is assistant professor of American Sign Language and director of the Center for Deaf Education at California Baptist University in Riverside. His dissertation was about theological education and disability.

Craig Rennebohm founded the Mental Health Chaplaincy in Seattle in 1987. The chaplaincy provides services for the mentally ill, including homeless people, and training for congregations to support families experiencing mental illness. Rennebohm now trains others for mental health chaplaincy.