A typically pessimistic view of aging is that it leads to a steady decline in physical and mental abilities. In this volume leading gerontologists and geriatric researchers explore the immense potential of older adults to overcome the challenges of old age and pursue active lives with renewed vitality. The contributors believe that resilience capacities diminishing with old age is a misconception and argue that individuals may successfully capitalize on their existing resources, skills and cognitive processes in order to achieve new learning, continuing growth, and enhanced life-satisfaction. By identifying useful psychological resources such as social connectedness, personal engagement and commitment, openness to new experiences, social support and sustained cognitive activity, the authors present a balanced picture of resilient aging. Older adults, while coping with adversity and losses, can be helped to maintain a complementary focus on psychological strengths, positive emotions, and regenerative capacities to achieve continued growth and healthy longevity.

This volume derived from original presentations given at a conference in Atlanta, Georgia, under the auspices of the Center for Child Well-Being. Scholars, practitioners, public health professionals, and principals in the child development community convened to address a science-based framework for elements of well-being and how the elements might be developed across the life course. Integrating physical, cognitive, and social-emotional domains, Well-Being is the first scientific book to consider well-being holistically. Focusing on a set of core strengths grouped within these three domains, the book also includes a fourth section on developmental strengths through adulthood that broadly examines a continuum of health and development, as well as transitions in well-being. This volume takes a developmental perspective across the life course, describing foundational strengths for well-being--the capacities that can be actively developed, supported, or learned. These foundational strengths--problem solving, emotional regulation, and physical safety--are the positive underpinnings of early child health and development, as well as ongoing well-being across the life course. Working together and blending their respective disciplinary perspectives and expertise, 53 experts in psychology, sociology, child development, and medicine have contributed to the book.

Throughout the world, rates of depression are greater among females than males, and this gender gap emerges during adolescence and persists throughout adulthood. Until recently, women's health has centered on the topic of reproductive health, because research focused almost exclusively on biological and anatomical differences distinguishing men and women. Social and behavioral research on gender differences in health now employs multiple disciplinary frameworks and methodologies, and researchers seek to understand the higher rates of specific diseases and disorders in women and men. Symptoms of depression and the diagnosis of depression are more prevalent in women, and research that focuses on biological, psychological, and sociopolitical explanations for this gender gap should now be brought together to better inform efforts at treatment and prevention. Women and Depression is a handbook that serves to move toward a more integrative approach to women's depression in particular and mental health for all more generally.

This special issue is devoted to the topic of "risk and resilience" in human development, a topic that epitomizes the complexity of human development as a process of constancy and change throughout life. The three empirical papers in this issue represent strong contributions to the growing corpus of research on risk and resilience in human development. The first one focuses on the uniquely vulnerable population of urban ethnic minority adolescent males. The second paper focuses on the risk and resilience from trauma in a sample of mostly Caucasian individuals from rural Iowa, who were at the last assessment, in the midst of transition into young adulthood. It measures an array of mental disorders outcomes and reveals the theoretical importance of timing of the risk factor. The last paper is a study begun in 1978 of a cohort of individuals with serious adolescent-onset mental disorder. It compares these individuals against the risk and resilience profiles of a matched sample without serious adolescent-onset psychiatric disorder. In sum this issue adds to the corpus of the frontiers of resilience research.

This special issue is devoted to the topic of "risk and resilience" in human development, a topic that epitomizes the complexity of human development as a process of constancy and change throughout life. The three empirical papers in this issue represent strong contributions to the growing corpus of research on risk and resilience in human development. The first one focuses on the uniquely vulnerable population of urban ethnic minority adolescent males. The second paper focuses on the risk and resilience from trauma in a sample of mostly Caucasian individuals from rural Iowa, who were at the last assessment, in the midst of transition into young adulthood. It measures an array of mental disorders outcomes and reveals the theoretical importance of timing of the risk factor. The last paper is a study begun in 1978 of a cohort of individuals with serious adolescent-onset mental disorder. It compares these individuals against the risk and resilience profiles of a matched sample without serious adolescent-onset psychiatric disorder. In sum this issue adds to the corpus of the frontiers of resilience research.

A typically pessimistic view of aging is that it leads to a steady decline in physical and mental abilities. In this volume leading gerontologists and geriatric researchers explore the immense potential of older adults to overcome the challenges of old age and pursue active lives with renewed vitality. The contributors believe that resilience capacities diminishing with old age is a misconception and argue that individuals may successfully capitalize on their existing resources, skills and cognitive processes in order to achieve new learning, continuing growth, and enhanced life-satisfaction. By identifying useful psychological resources such as social connectedness, personal engagement and commitment, openness to new experiences, social support and sustained cognitive activity, the authors present a balanced picture of resilient aging. Older adults, while coping with adversity and losses, can be helped to maintain a complementary focus on psychological strengths, positive emotions, and regenerative capacities to achieve continued growth and healthy longevity.

Throughout the world, rates of depression are greater among females than males, and this gender gap emerges during adolescence and persists throughout adulthood. Until recently, women's health has centered on the topic of reproductive health, because research focused almost exclusively on biological and anatomical differences distinguishing men and women. Social and behavioral research on gender differences in health now employs multiple disciplinary frameworks and methodologies, and researchers seek to understand the higher rates of specific diseases and disorders in women and men. Symptoms of depression and the diagnosis of depression are more prevalent in women, and research that focuses on biological, psychological, and sociopolitical explanations for this gender gap should now be brought together to better inform efforts at treatment and prevention. Women and Depression is a handbook that serves to move toward a more integrative approach to women's depression in particular and mental health for all more generally.