The International Handbook of Adult Development and Wisdom

Research and theory in adult development offers ideas about emotional maturity and cognitive development in adult life as well as operational definitions and methods that might provide clarity and rigor in work on wisdom. The study of human development offers a scaffold for understanding the emergence of wisdom, or the “process” that includes several lines of development, which may begin in childhood but which flower in adult life. This handbook brings together researchers from across the globe to examine theory and research about wisdom, especially as it relates to current ideas about adult development. Each chapter reviews both what has been accomplished in recent years and puts forward several perspectives, new and old, about the definition of wisdom, how it is understood across cultures, and how it can be integrated into the broader field of adult development.

Section 1 introduces the work contained in the volume and undertakes an historical view of how periods, levels, and stages of life have been conceptualized over time. Section 2 reviews paradigms, theories, and models, including the intersection of environment and genes, the development of emotional maturity, generative learning, and the importance of radical ambiguity in adult life. Section 3 suggests a taxonomy of wisdom and reviews eastern versus western cultural differences, wisdom across the lifespan, and the literature on wise leadership. Finally, the volume editors bring together the various threads, highlighting intersections, and suggesting ways to find consonance across ideas and approaches. In each chapter, the authors point out the strengths and weaknesses in theory and research, while also making suggestions for future research.

Chapter 13 of this work is available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International open access licence. This part of the work is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Judith Stevens-Long is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Fielding Graduate University, where she served as Associate Dean for Curriculum Development from 2001 to 2008. She is also Emerita of California State University, where she focused on adult development. Her research publications range from works on child development to work on death and dying, and include Adult Life and Living Well, Dying Well, the latter coauthored with Dohrea Bardell. She works with Hospice of Santa Barbara as a death educator and patient service volunteer and heads the Santa Barbara chapter of Love on a Leash, a therapy dog organization.

Eeva K. Kallio is Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Tampere in Finland. Her research focuses on the development of wisdom and adult development from psychological and philosophical perspectives. She leads the psychological research group in the Research Council of Finland's "Wisdom in practice" project (2022-2026) at the at the University of Jyväskylä's Finnish Institute for Educational Research, is Honorary President of the European Society for Research in Adult Development (ESRAD), and has edited several books on adult developmental psychology. She is a taiji/qigong enthusiast and is interested in why philosophical-existential questions are always worth pondering.