Jiska Cohen-Mansfield
Keynote 5
The challenges of challenging behaviour
Jiska Cohen-Mansfield is a Professor at the Department of Health Promotion at the School of Public Health and the director of the Minerva Center for Interdisciplinary Study of End of Life at Tel-Aviv University.
Prof. Cohen-Mansfield’s work focuses on understanding persons with dementia. She has described behavior problems among persons with dementia, also termed ‘agitation’. Here classification of these behaviors into aggressive behaviors, physical non-aggressive behaviors and verbal behaviors is widely used. In her studies, she clarified the psychosocial and environmental factors affecting agitated behaviors in persons with dementia and developed an intervention algorithm to treat and prevent aggression and other types of agitation in persons with dementia. She studied what factors affect engagement with stimuli among persons with dementia. Her work on psychotic manifestations among persons with dementia serves to clarify the environmental triggers for these manifestations, as well as their meaning to the people experiencing them. She has also studied mental health in older adults and ways to improve it, including studies of loneliness and health behaviors. He work also involved the examination of end of life, and study of technological innovations that can improve wellbeing of older persons.
She has published over 300 publications in scientific journals and books, for which she is a highly cited researcher as listed by the ISI. She has developed a number of assessment tools and treatment approaches which are used internationally. Prof. Cohen-Mansfield has received multiple professional awards, including the Busse Research Award, Barry Reisberg Award for Alzheimer’s Research, Pfizer Quality Improvement Award, Psychologists in Long-Term Care Outstanding Contribution Award, Powell Lawton Distinguished Contribution Award in Applied Gerontology, the International Psychogeriatric Association 2015 Award for Distinguished Service to the Field of Psychogeriatrics, and fellowships in the Gerontological Society of America and the American Psychological Association. Her studies have been replicated by investigators around the world. Furthermore, the knowledge and materials developed are being used by both clinicians and researchers internationally.
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