1
1
Foundational Concepts
and Issues of Positive
Psychology: The What
and Why of Happiness
I don’t think that my positive psychology story is all
that unusual. In the mid-1990s I was happily engaged
with investigating memory biases in depression (e.g.,
Watkins, 2002; Watkins, Martin, & Stern, 2000), but had
been tinkering with a psychological approach to gratitude. My
early gratitude research involved creating a questionnaire mea-
suring gratitude, and conducting simple correlational studies
with this scale. But as my research in depression started hitting
some dead ends, the results with gratitude just kept piling up. It
seemed that study after study showed that gratitude was related
to desirable human characteristics. Then two important events
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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 4/15/2024 5:45 PM via INDIANA WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
AN: 1092699 ; Philip C. Watkins, PhD.; Positive Psychology 101
Account: s8876267.main.edsocls
