Although many aspects of fluid cognition decline with advancing age, simple observation in the wild suggests that older adults, generally speaking, do very well in their day-to-day life. The study of the orchestration of cognitive, social, and motivational compensatory mechanisms in the service of effective and healthy aging provides a meaningful challenge to traditional ways of examining developmental changes in cognitive performance. An additional impetus comes from recent discoveries in the neuroscience of aging, all demonstrating substantial amounts of functional modifiability, compensation, and plasticity of the human brain, even in very old age. Furthermore, the discovery of string relationships between engagement in mentally enriching and socially stimulating activities and cognitive health and longevity has sparked a new generation of training studies aimed at improving or sustaining cognitive fitness in old age. This book examines the role of compensatory mechanisms in such diverse facets of cognitive processing as perceptual processes, text comprehension, dual-task processing, and episodic and prospective memory. This ensemble of studies compellingly shows that older adults' everyday cognitive life is governed not by the decline in elementary cognitive processes as measured in the lab, but by a multitude of compensatory mechanisms, most of which are of the social/motivational variety. Much of this compensatory behavior can be elicited with no or only little experimental prodding, underscoring the self-organizing or self-initiated nature of this type of behavior, even in advanced old age. This book was originally published as a special issue of Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition.

Berlin, Spring of 1995. While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charit?, a Holocaust survivor tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Who is that talking cat, why do ghosts of SS soldiers roam the city, and what is Speer's favorite actress up to?

Over the last decade, the field of socio-emotional development and aging has rapidly expanded, with many new theories and empirical findings emerging. This trend is consistent with the broader movement in psychology to consider social, motivational, and emotional influences on cognition and behavior. The Oxford Handbook of Emotion, Social Cognition, and Problem Solving in Adulthood provides the first overview of a new field of adult development that has emerged out of conceptualizations and research at the intersections between socioemotional development, social cognition, emotion, coping, and everyday problem solving. This field roundly rejects a universal deficit model of aging, highlighting instead the dynamic nature of socio-emotional development and the differentiation of individual trajectories of development as a function of variation in contextual and experiential influences. It emphasizes the need for a cross-level examination (from biology and neuroscience to cognitive and social psychology) of the determinants of emotional and socio-emotional behavior. This volume also serves as a tribute to the late Fredda Blanchard-Fields, whose thinking and empirical research contributed extensively to a life-span developmental view of emotion, problem solving, and social cognition. Its chapters cover multiple aspects of adulthood and aging, presenting developmental perspectives on emotion; antecedents and consequences of emotion in context; everyday problem solving; social cognition; goals and goal-related behaviors; and wisdom. The landmark volume in this new field, The Oxford Handbook of Emotion, Social Cognition, and Problem Solving in Adulthood is an important resource for cognitive, developmental, and social psychologists, as well as researchers and graduate students in the field of aging, emotion studies, and social psychology.

Mindfulness and one of the roads to it, meditation, have become increasingly popular as a way to promote health and well-being. Meditation can create mindfulness in daily life, which becomes an ingrained habit if applied consistently-it can boost immune function; lower levels of stress, anxiety, or depression; lift affect; regulate emotion more easily; and make you happier. Presence reviews how meditation calms the body and what goes on inside the brain during meditation-how it impacts control over attention, awareness of the body, and the experience of self. It examines how meditation leaves telltale lasting traces in brain structure, and how it impacts important areas of life such as well-being, stress, and health. In addition, it examines how mindfulness can be useful as therapy, alleviating depression, anxiety, worry, and pain. A final chapter provides advice on how to meditate and practice mindfulness in a scientifically sound way, based on what we know about how meditation works. Over the last decade, research on these beneficial effects has boomed in the cognitive and behavioral psychology and neuroscience literature, and Presence provides an overview of this research that is thorough and accessible for the curious meditator, seasoned or beginner, as well as for students and practitioners of contemplative science and related fields.

The Elements of Cognitive Aging provides a qualitative overview (mostly using graphical meta-analysis) of the vast literature on aging and speeded tasks-bringing together, for the first time, almost everything we know about aging and processing speed. The book investigates age-related slowing in elementary tasks (including updated parameters for the Aging Human Information Processor) and tasks of executive control (inhibition, task shifting, and task coordination). It examines regularities in the age-related effects of these tasks that might hint at underlying brain-related mechanisms, while having a keen eye for alternative explanations (such as increased caution with age). It models the course of speed-of-processing over the lifespan and investigates the influence of generational differences on mental speed. Finally, it examines the influence of age-related mental slowing on other aspects of cognition (working memory, executive control episodic memory, aspects of fluid intelligence), and provides the first systematic review of age-speed-cognition mediation in a longitudinal context.