Carol D. Ryff, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute on Aging and Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centers on the study of psychological well-being, an area in which she has developed multidimensional assessment scales that have been translated to more than 25 different languages and are currently in use studies around the world. Dr. Ryff has catalyzed extensive multidisciplinary research on topics related to life course development (e.g., parenting; aging transitions; social relations, emotions, and health). Since 1996, she has edited four books that