By Josh Tapper, Guelph Mercury News August 10, 2010 Although adults older than 65 face challenges to body and brain, the 70s and 80s also bring an abundance of social and emotional knowledge, qualities scientists are beginning to define as wisdom. As Carstensen and another social psychologist, Fredda...

By Charles Q. Choi "The dozen students and scientists spread over an area called Furnace Creek looked like cyborgs in floppy hats scrabbling over the boulders. Before hammering chips off rocks, they inspected them with magnifying lenses held up next to eyeglasses sporting miniature cameras and infrared...

By Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich , npr.org "If you've ever kept a journal, you've probably worried about someone coming across it and getting an uninvited peek into your personal life. But the daily traces we leave behind in our writings – more and more in today's world of emails,...

by Caroline Bassett, The Wisdom Institute "Recently, on a trip East from my home in Minnesota, my sister and I visited a 101-year-old friend of the family, an exemplar of elder wisdom, who lives in rural Massachusetts. Aunt Jane, as we called her (not her real name and some details have been changed...

The fall, 2009 issue of Itineraries is titled "The Harvest of Wisdom" and focuses on elder wisdom. Table of Contents Caroline Bassett Elder Wisdom Drew Leder The Tao of Longevity Margaret Owen Thorpe Bird Wisdom Robert C. Atchley Serving from Spirit Jane F. Gilgun The Yellow Brick Road of Not...

By Val Farmer | INFORUM "There is one quality that improves with age. That quality happens to be a wonderful virtue. It is wisdom. Wisdom encompasses other virtues. Wisdom incorporates other virtues that are essential to happiness. A wise person will have embraced principles of love, service and...

The Los Angeles Times recently printed an article about How to Live , by Henry Alford, a comedian who set out to write a book about wisdom. "Nothing distresses one of my friends more than hearing that someone has died short of their 70th birthday and Psalm 90's promise of three score and 10...

by Andrew Zuckerman "Inspired by the idea that wisdom is the greatest gift one generation can give to another, award-winning photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman interviewed, photographed and filmed 50 of the world's great writers, actors, artists, designers, politicians, musicians and...

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain The New York Times By SARA REISTAD-LONG Published: May 20, 2008 When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong...

The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis The New York Times By STEPHEN S. HALL Published: May 6, 2007 In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during...

By Joanne C. Giblin Abstract: This article defines wisdom and despair as choices for cognitively intact older adults. Some individuals are able to integrate the conditions of old age while others respond in ways that inhibit effective integration. The conscious aging theory, as well as Erikson's...

By Lewis P. Jordan Abstract: There is very little research on Alaska Native (AN) elders and how they subjectively define a successful older age. The lack of a culturally-specific definition often results in the use of a generic definition that portrays Alaska Native elders as aging less successfully...

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 and longitudinal studies show that wisdom characteristics...

By Monika Ardelta, Scott D. Landesa and George E. Vaillant Abstract: According to theories of stress-related growth, coping with traumatic events can lead to greater psychosocial maturity in resilient individuals or psychosocial maladjustment in less resilient individuals. Using a sample of 160 World...

By Monika Ardelt Abstract: This study examined whether (a) older adults are wiser than college students, (b) college-educated older adults are wiser than current college students, and (c) wise older adults show evidence of personal growth. Using a sample of 477 undergraduate college students and 178...

By Dani Dumitriu, Jiandong Hao, Yuko Hara, Jeffrey Kaufmann, William G. M. Janssen, Wendy Lou, Peter R. Rapp, and John H. Morrison Age-associated memory impairment (AAMI) occurs in many mammalian species, including humans. In contrast to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in which circuit disruption occurs through...

Nicholas W. Simon , Candi L. LaSarge , Karienn S. Montgomery , Matthew T. Williams , Ian A. Mendez , Barry Setlow , Jennifer L. Bizon The ability to make advantageous choices among outcomes that differ in magnitude, probability, and delay until their arrival is critical for optimal survival and well...

by Igor Grossmann, Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Denise C. Park, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Speci fi cally, older...

by Ute Kunzmann and David Richter Previously, we found that during films about age-typical losses, older adults experienced greater sadness than young adults, whereas their physiological responses were just as large. In the present study, our goal was to replicate this finding and extend past work by...

By P. J. Henry and David O Sears 'The conventional wisdom is that racial prejudice remains largely stable through adulthood. However, very little is known about the development of contemporary racial attitudes like symbolic racism. The growing crystallization of symbolic racism through the lifespan...