In this book Jan D. Sinnott synthesizes her 20 years of research on lifespan cognitive development to describe the growth of complex (or postformal') thought in adults. She shows specifically how adults improve mentally over a lifetime and learn to think in more complex and wiser ways. Applications of postformal thought are demonstrated in such diverse areas as - family relations - adult education - personal identity - and spirituality. Chapters examine relations between postformal thought and pertinent variables such as age, health, memory, and vocabulary. Other sections deal with...

I first met Ernest Furchtgott twenty-five years ago after joining the faculty of the College of Social Work at the University of South Carolina. At that time, Ernie chaired the Department of Psychology. In the following three years we collaborated with an Academic Committee on Gerontology in conceptualizing and shaping the University's Certificate of Graduate Study in Gerontology Program, guiding it to final approval by the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education. For twenty years we team- taught our graduate-level course, "Psychosocial Approaches to Geron- tology," involving colleagues...

This volume is an outgrowth ofcontemporary research on development over the adult lifespan, which by now has burgeoned and developed both nationally and internationally. However, for us, the impetus to be involved in this area was spawned and nurtured by our initial association with the Society for Research in Adult Development (SRAD) with its origins some 15 years ago by Michael Commonsand his associates inCambridge, Massachusetts. Throughthegood will and support of this society, we also became, and are still, heavily involved with the Journal of Adult Development and the Kluwer-Plenum...

This volume explores the strengths and opportunities of old age as these are manifested by the accomplishments of aging artists, late artistic works, and elderly arts audiences. It critically examines the psychology of creativity, cognitive development, and gerontology, and will be of interest to a wide range of professionals and students in these fields.

That painting is at least in part an expression of the painter's personality is obvious from the differences between very impulsive and very controlled painters - between the paintings of a Picasso, for example, and a Piet Mondriaan. But these differences have not been looked at in a controlled setting. In this book, Machotka sets out to understand the images produced by a broad sample of students and to connect them to the students' inner lives - to their interpersonal relations, their wishes and fears, their impulses and inhibitions. Their image making was followed in detail and their...

An unusually understandable survey of the forces or perception and feeling that determine the purchases we make; the roles played by fashion, fads, and status; and the psychological needs that they fulfill. The book discusses how children become consumers and how they change as they age. Research based throughout, it shows how ads use classical conditioning, harnessing psychological motivation to create image and sell products.

This volume proposes a theoretical integration of several major streams in contemporary psychological theory about adult development and therapy. It adopts the perspective that there are steps in development throughout the adult period, and that they are characterized by a union of the cognitive and affective, the self and the other, and idea with idea (in second-order collective abstractions). That is, they are at once postformal in terms of Piaget's theory, sociocultural in terms ofVygotsky's theory, and postmodern- with the latter perspective providing an integrating theme. The...

From time to time, professional journals and edited volumes devote some of their pages to considerations of pain and aging as they occur among the aged in different cultures and populations. One starts from several reasonable assumptions, among them that aging per se is not a disease process, yet the risk and frequency of disease processes increase with ongoing years. The physical body's functioning and ability to restore all forms of damage and insult slow down, the immune system becomes compromised, and the slow-growing pathologies reach their critical mass in the later years. The...

The author proposes a theory of the development of consciousness in which ego is the central agent of socialization and culture and the driving force behind individual self-control and self-regulation. He reviews the literature on identity and narrative; outlines the fields of intellectual, self, moral, and consciousness development; and discusses the evidence indicating that the development of consciousness trancends the limitations of conventional ego development.

Human Development in Adulthood is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary overview of adult development in a number of areas both personal and societal, from mental and physical health, to economic and social conditions. Variables including race, gender, economic status, and political and religious affiliation are considered in the discussion of such human issues as - love and marital relations - economic concerns, including employment and living conditions - violence in its various forms, including crime and war - aging and death. The numerous illustrations, chapter summaries, and...