Welcome to our special Thanksgiving edition of Think Biblically Conversations on Faith and Culture.

I'm your host, Scott Ray. And I'm your co-host, Sean McDowell. And we're going to let you know,

we are reposting an episode that we have done specifically related to Thanksgiving on gratitude

and how to nurture that and develop that and express that during this Thanksgiving

week.

We look forward to the conversation and hope it's useful for you as you enter this Thanksgiving season.

Dr. Stacey L.T.D. is with us.

Stacey, thanks so much for being with us.

Well, thank you for having me.

Stacey has a whole host of areas of expertise. She has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the

University of Essex in England and publications on a very broad scale. But one of the areas that

she's done quite a lot of thinking about is this area of gratitude and a psychology of gratitude. So I'm really

interested as we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving. I thought it was appropriate to have some

maybe deeper reflections on gratitude than what we might have thought about before. So Stacey,

thanks for being with us. You know, You've been a professor for some time.

I've done a lot of thinking about this area of gratitude and thankfulness. What motivated you,

first of all, to start doing some of this professionally? Well, my background is not in gratitude.

Like you said, I have a wide range of interest. And Well, my background is not in gratitude.

Like you said, I have a wide range of interest, and my early research actually had to do with the area of anxiety.

So if you think of anxiety could be like the opposite of gratitude, where you're worrying about things going on in your life and you're focusing on the negative.

And a lot of anxiety research deals with this idea of if you're highly anxious,

you actually focus your attention on threatening information in your environment.

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