Willibald Ruch

Willibald Ruch works as an emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychology of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Willibald received his PhD from the University of Graz, Austria in 1980 and later worked at different universities in Germany, the UK and Switzerland. Earlier in his career he worked on topics such as humor, amusement and laughter, as well as cheerfulness as a state and trait. After attending a positive psychology (PP) think tank in Akumal and the first PP summits in Washington he broadened his research to study PP topics such as character strengths and virtues, well-being and fulfilment in life, positive interventions and trainings of character strengths, including humor together with his collaborators at the University of Zurich. Willibald is co-editing or on the editorial board of several journals (including Journal of Research in Personality, Journal of Positive Psychology), and co-editor of two book series. Recently he published the Hogrefe Handbook of Positive Psychology Assessment together with Arnold Bakker, Louis Tay and Fabian Gander. He is the founder of the Swiss Positive Psychology Association, an IPPA Fellow and senior scientist at the VIA Institute of character and he runs a post graduate course on positive psychology at the University of Zurich. He studied classical guitar and hopes to find more time to cultivate these skills again during retirement.