Appreciation therapy or appreciation therapy is a method and attitude for dealing with people with dementia, which can be used particularly in elderly care as well as in social life in general. Appreciation therapy is, on the one hand, the respectful, non-ignorant, appreciative attitude developed for dealing with people with dementia, and is based in particular - according to Carl Rogers - on the basic attitudes of client-centered therapy aimed at accepting the behavior of people with dementia as correct for them. On the other hand, appreciation is a special form of social communication characterized by acceptance and non-correction and attempts to understand and discern the needs of the person concerned. Appreciation therapy was developed by Naomi Vail, a social worker who assumed that disoriented older people are struggling to navigate the messy issues in their lives. According to her, users of the appreciation method should make it their job to support these people in this process. While Nicole Richard, a German gerontologist, developed appreciation therapy as part of a national working group and called her method integrative appreciation, her approach does not see the practitioner as making it his job to care for and accompany people with dementia in the process of coping with “unfinished business”, but rather to accept them as they are and their current state of mind. According to Richard, this means that people become calmer because they feel understood. Appreciation therapy uses a number of specific techniques, but has drawn criticism from researchers who dispute the evidence for some of the beliefs and values of appreciation therapy, and the appropriateness of these techniques, because there is insufficient evidence to prove that such methods are effective for people with dementia.