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This paper synthesizes two perspectives on essentialism: cognitive and social. The cognitive essentialist perspective argues that our bias to appeal to the psychological belief that categories have innate essences enables us to make inferences about social categories such as race, caste, and gender. The social essentialist perspective argues that essentialist thinking serves the needs of those in power to justify existing social and economic hierarchies. Examining the relationship between essentialism and power, this paper expands the framework for folk sociology, incorporating cognitive and social essentialist accounts to examine folk theories of social differences between caste, race, gender, and class, with a particular emphasis on social marginality and cultural narratives. Further, this paper discusses the relevance of the folk sociology perspective to the study of children's emerging understanding of their social world.

Herbert Simon's work on bounded rationality has had little impact on researchers studying older adults' decision making. This omission is surprising, as human constraints on computation and memory are exacerbated in older adults. The study of older adults' decision-making processes could benefit from employing a bounded rationality perspective, but any such attempt must take into account the role that emotions play in older adults' information processing, memory, and attention allocation. This is especially the case because older adults show relatively less decrements in performance when tasks are imbedded in or laden with emotional stimuli, and they exhibit a greater tendency to rely on emotional information. We examine recent work on bounded rationality and studies investigating older adults' utilization of, and attention to, emotional information, with the aim of creating a framework that captures the mechanisms underlying older adults' decision making.

This article focuses on the common and unique contributions of three major life-span theories in addressing improvement/maintenance and reorientation, which represent central processes of coping with major life change and loss. For this purpose, we review and compare the dual-process model of assimilative and accommodative coping, the model of selection, optimization, and compensation, and the life-span theory of control. Although these theories share many basic assumptions about developmental regulation, each theory also has unique elements and offers varying degrees of refinement regarding particular aspects. To facilitate research on improvement/maintenance and reorientation guided by these theories, we identify conceptual overlap as well as delineate differential features with respect to key definitions, predictions, and related empirical evidence. We conclude with recommendations and suggestions for future research.