The Gallup International Positive Psychology Summit will take place in Washington DC, USA, from October 5-7, 2006. This conference on positive psychology attracts many cool speakers such as Richard Florida and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Positive psychology set in in the 90s with Martin Seligman as one of its founders. Before then, psychology was pointed towards pathology, and curing mental illnesses. The focus of positive psychology, in contrast, lies on identifying and nurturing talent. The school of positive psychology becomes popular in various areas like organisation development (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003), evaluation research (Preskill & Coghlan, 2003) and in thinking about organisational change (Whitney & Trosten-Bloom, 2003). Although this way of thinking became popular only recently, it is built on concepts that have been proven earlier to play an important role in the learning process such as self-efficacy.