Moral Motivation through the Life Span is the fifty-first volume in the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation series, the longest continuously running symposium in the field of psychology. This work focuses on moral development theory and research, an area of academic study that began early in the twentieth century but has never before been addressed by the Symposium. What is morality, such theorists ask, and what exactly makes a moral person? The contributors to this volume are of diverse theoretical orientations and take different stances on a number of major themes: What motivates moral behavior? Are there certain universal moral values, or are such values always subjective? Does an individual's will or an individual's environment play a greater role in determining moral conduct? What influence can we attribute to spirituality? Finally, the contributors explore the practical applications of their research on moral motivation: What implications do such theories have for child-rearing or our educational system? How do we raise the next generation to be empathetic toward their fellow human beings? Nebraska-Lincoln and the recipient of a distinguished research award from the American Psychological Association and the John Templeton Foundation. Carolyn Pope Edwards is Willa Cather Professor and a professor of psychology and of family and consumer sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the coauthor of Ngecha: A Kenyan Community in a Time of Rapid Social Change (Nebraska 2004) and the co-editor of Bambini: The Italian Approach to Infant-Toddler Care.

The prestigious group of scholars assembled for this thirty-ninth volume of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation address important issues in "Psychology and Aging." In the first chapter, James E. Birren and Laurel M. Fisher consider slowness of behavior as a general condition often associated with advancing age and explore its implications of a wide range of hierarchical functions. In succeeding chapters Martha Storandt assesses memory-skills training for older adults, and Irene Mackintosh Hulicka offers, in a previously unpublished G. Stanley Hall lecture, cogent reasons for teaching about aging in psychology classes and procedures for doing so.
Challenging the view that cognitive aging is identical with decline, Paul B. Baltes, Jacqui Smith, and Ursula Staudinger adopt the hypothesis of simultaneous growth and decline and relate it to wisdom. Trait psychology is discussed by Paul T. Costa, Jr., and Robert R. McCrae, who review the most recent advances and present new data from longitudinal studies. K. Warner Schaie and his colleagues describe problems and methods of studying natural cohorts within a longitudinal study and report the first data on adult parent-offspring similarity determined as a function of the age of the pair when studied. A commentary chapter by Ross A. Thompson concludes the volume.