This book is based on a conference entitled “Life-Span Perspectives on Motivation and Control,” organized by Jutta Heckhausen and Carol Dweck and held in July 1995 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

We are grateful to a number of people and institutions for their contributions to the conference and to this volume. First, we thank Paul Baltes, director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin for hosting and providing financial support for the conference. We also thank Ulrich Knappek for his excellent work on the administrative tasks involved in organizing the conference, and Kim Saccio-Kent for her most professional copyediting of the book manuscript. Moreover, we thank all the authors for submitting superb chapters, and for patiently and expertly responding to our editorial comments. Finally, the work on this edited volume profited much from a most conducive environment at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, where Jutta Heckhausen spent the year 1995–6 as a fellow (MacArthur Foundation Grant #8900078).