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Wisdom has been discussed for centuries. Although its meaning has varied over time depending on the time and place of its use, there are remarkable similarities in how wisdom is understood. Although wisdom has come to have a wide range of historically specific meanings, it is possible to provide a typology of three broad forms of wisdom: (1) the oldest and most common sense of wisdom refers to the human ability to personally cope with life; (2) Since the Ancient Greeks, wisdom sometimes refers to a rational system by which one can interpret the cosmos ”a basis for both philosophy and modern science; finally, (3) wisdom is sometimes considered the personification or an attribute of [a] God.This edited book concerns the scientific study of the first and oldest form of wisdom, human wisdom of how to attain the good things in life, as people personally understand them. In this sense, personal wisdom represents an ideal of human experience and an essential factor in people "s efforts to live life to the fullest. Since people do not always agree on what makes for an ideal life, it is not surprising that even here we find a wide range of ideas about wisdom, centered on the themes of Knowing, Feeling, and Acting, as identified by Polin (1955).In this volume, the contributing authors clarify their ideas about personal wisdom in light of the three prototypes or master narratives of wisdom. Furthermore, contributors position their approach to the science of personal wisdom, which we take to be distinct from general philosophical or task-focused accounts of wisdom ”a distinction that has proven a point of divergence between the major research programs studying wisdom empirically today.The volume includes original contributions that review work in the field and empirical evidence in support of the claims about what is essential to personal wisdom and how it can be studied scientifically.