Monika Ardelt, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Sociology and the 2008 Colonel Allan R. and Margaret G. Crow Term Professor at the University of Florida. She is also a 1999 Brookdale National Fellow and a 2005 Positive Psychology Templeton Senior Fellow. She is a Founding Faculty Member and Member of the Advisory Committee of the Center for Spirituality and Health at the University of Florida. Dr. Ardelt received her Diplom (M.A.) in Sociology from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University of Frankfurt/Main in Germany and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on successful human development across the life course with particular emphasis on the relations between wisdom, religion, spirituality, aging well, and dying well.
Ardelt, M. (2011). The measurement of wisdom: A commentary on Taylor, Bates, and Webster’s comparison of the SAWS and 3D-WS. Experimental Aging Research, 37(2), 241-255. doi: 10.1080/0361073X.2011.554509.
In my reply to Taylor, Bates, and Webster’s article, I (a) clarify the development and assessment of the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS), (b) describe the difference between the essential components of wisdom and its predictors, correlates, and...
Ardelt, M. (2011). Wisdom, age, and well-being. In K. W. Schaie & S. L. Willis (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of aging (7th ed., pp. 279-291 ). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
After giving an overview of Western, Eastern, and culturally inclusive theories of wisdom, this chapter summarizes the theoretical and empirical research on the association between aging and wisdom and the effect of wisdom on well-being. Cross-sectional...
Ardelt, M., & Oh, H. (2010). Wisdom: Definition, assessment, and its relation to successful cognitive and emotional aging. In D. Jeste & C. Depp (Eds.), Successful cognitive and emotional aging (pp. 87-113). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.
This chapter gives an overview of the definition and assessment of wisdom in the contemporary literature and describes its relation to successful cognitive and emotional aging.
Ardelt, M. (2010). Age, experience, and the beginning of wisdom. In D. Dannefer & C. Phillipson (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social gerontology (pp. 306-316). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
What wisdom is and what it encompasses has been variously defined across the ages, starting with the earliest ‘wisdom literature' among the ancient Sumerians in 3000 B.C. (Birren and Svensson, 2005). Distinctions between wisdom as knowledge of the...