This book presents a coherent framework for the balanced development of emotions and cognition throughout the lifespan. It synthesizes rich sources across psychology and neuroscience to show that the brain is hard-wired for basic emotions as well as reasoning, and that these structures mature as individuals learn social rules in interactions with others and progress through complex relationships. In contrast to traditional views that held emotions and cognition to be opposing domains, the author builds on recent views that emphasize the ideal of a cooperative relationship among the two domains. Central to this construct is the fragile balance of expansion and stability that is crucial to both cognitive and affective development: how it can be nurtured for optimal functioning, and how, in contrast, the absence of such a caring context functions to derail growth and encourage pathology that can be carried into later stages of the lifespan.

This groundbreaking volume:

• Traces historical changes in conceptions of the relation between reason and emotion from ancient philosophy to modern science.
• Expands on Piaget's theories of alternating phases of equilibrium in cognitive development and details how these contribute toward integrated cognitive-emotional growth.
• Discusses neurobiological mechanisms contributing to balance between emotional and cognitive development.
• Presents examples of the integration of cognitive/emotional development from infancy to adulthood.
• Explores the relationships between affect and cognition in later life. Integrating Emotions and Cognition Throughout the Lifespan is an essential resource for researchers, graduate students, and clinicians in a range of disciplines, including developmental psychology, aging, educational philosophy, biological psychology, and personality/social psychology.

Autorentext
Gisela Labouvie-Vief received her Ph.D.in Life/Span Developmental Psychology from West Virginia University in 1972. In 1976, she joined the faculty of Psychology at Wayne State University, where she held the title of Distinguished Professor of Psychology until she received a call from the University of Geneva in 2005. Dr. Labouvie-Vief's work has been acknowledged by a series of Awards and Distinctions, including the APA, Division 20, Distinguished Research Achievement Award in 2001, the 2006 Creative Longevity and Wisdom Outstanding Researcher Award, Fielding Graduate University, and Distinguished Faculty Awards from Wayne State University in 2009. She has held visiting Professor positions at the University of Chicago (1992), Harvard University (1981-1983), the University of California at Berkeley (1999), and the Max Planck Institute Berlin (2002).

Zusammenfassung
This book synthesizes the literature on emotional development and cognition across the lifespan. The book proposes a core language by which to describe positive and problematic developmental changes by recourse to a parsimonious set of core principles, such as elevations or declines in tension thresholds and their relation to the waxing and waning of the cognitive system over the life course. It integrates, similarly, the lifelong consequences of the positive or damaging aspects of the social milieu in fostering increases in tension thresholds with their advanced capacity for maintaining equilibrium and warding off stress versus a lowering of tension thresholds with disturbances of equilibrium maintenance and heightened susceptibility to stress and deregulation.

Inhalt
Chapter 1. Preface.- Chapter 2. Introduction.- Chapter 3. Emotions and Cognition: From Myth and Philosophy to Modern Psychology and Neurobiology.- Chapter 4. Equilibrium and Disequilibrium in Development.- Chapter 5. Emotions in Infancy.- Chapter 6. Emotions in Childhood.- Chapter 7. Adolescence to Early Adulthood.- Chapter 8. Middle Adulthood.- Chapter 9. Aging.- Chapter 10. Postscript.