Concepts of positive dependence are becoming increasingly important in probability, statistics and their applications. While these concepts are traditionally viewed as focusing on positive and negative dependence for random vectors, they also are related to broader issues in the modeling and the analysis of multivariate data, and, in particular, ordinal data. Historically, positive dependence for the multivariate normal distribution had been synonymous with positive correlations. Other subsequently developed multivariate distributions were often interpreted with this perspective.