Musician-teacher identity is a "work-in-progress" spanning a career lifetime, yet little research appears to explore how this culminative development occurs, particularly from an individualized musician-teacher viewpoint. Using a qualitative epistemology, the author examines autoethnographic vignettes of life experience to highlight how…

In "Inclusive Leisure Services" (4th ed.), John Dattilo discusses the importance of including all people in leisure services, offering an educational model for learning about considerations and strategies to promote inclusive leisure services. He begins each chapter with an orientation activity including questions to stimulate reflection…

One of the major concerns about the one-child policy is its negative impact on the current and future labor force in China. People have talked about the Lewis Turning Point and the end of demographic dividends. Some of these arguments, however, can be misleading. The working-age population (ages 15 to 59) can be treated as the potential labor…

This essay applies a narrative perspective to the topic of "resilience." On various fronts (physical, social, biographical), aging itself, it argues, pushes us past a perception of aging as intrinsically tragic and toward a more ironic stance instead, one marked by increased acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity. Moreover, intentional engagement…

Seymour Sarason passed away on January 10, 2010 at the age of 91. He was the author of more than 40 books, including The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (1971), The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies (1972), and The Psychological Sense of Community: Prospects for a Community Psychology (1974). His groundbreaking ideas…

Salthouse (2011) argued that (a) variance between individuals on cognitive test scores remains constant between 20 and 90 years of age and (b) widely recognized problems of deducing functional relationships from patterns of correlations between measurements become especially severe for neuropsychological indices, especially for gross indices of…

In her article, "The Scientification of Skin Whitening and the Entrepreneurial University- Linked Corporate Scientific Officer," published in this issue, Amina Mire (2012) deconstructs the tacit investments implicit in such discourses of beauty, in particular those linked to cosmetic products that purport to fight the "war on aging" through the…

How do changes in life expectancy and longevity affect life-span development? This paper argues that historical increases in life expectancy primarily have an impact on the later and less on the earlier parts of the life span. Increased life expectancy is both a challenge and an opportunity for positive development. A perspective is outlined…

The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to…

Salthouse (2011) critically reviewed cross-sectional and longitudinal relations among adult age, brain structure, and cognition (ABC) and identified problems in interpretation of the extant literature. His review, however, missed several important points. First, there is enough disparity among the measures of brain structure and cognitive…

This paper offers a commentary on the articles in the special series on cognitive behavior therapy with older adults (Carmin, 2012-this issue), noting the commonalities found across discussions of diagnostic interviewing and cognitive-behavioral assessment and treatment for late-life insomnia, depression and suicide risk, PTSD, and OCD. These case…

The ageing of society is one of the biggest policy challenges of this time. Growing life expectancy and low birth rates mean that, for the fist time in human history, most people, and certainly the more prosperous social groups, will be spending a third of their lives in "retirement". This has profound social, cultural and economic…

Problems faced by the developmental disability service system in recruiting and retaining direct support staff are exacerbated by demands from competing service industries, including long term supports for the increasing aging population in the United States. Many factors account for high turnover and vacancy rates in the community service system,…

Older people with a lifelong disability, such as intellectual disability, face significant barriers to enjoying "active ageing" as they transition into retirement. Active ageing involves enhancement of quality of life through optimising the health, participation, and security of individuals and populations (World Health Organization [WHO], 2002).…

The concept of "successful aging" is a contested discourse in gerontology. Two conflicting paradigms dominate the discussion: a health promotion activity model, and a model critical of the concept of successful aging. However, this study takes a different perspective and proposes that perhaps we have been striving for the wrong goal. The true…