Public Health

Prof. Jiska Cohen-Mansfield

Mental health in aging

Prof. Cohen -Mansfield’s research focus is on mental health promotion in the older population, with an emphasis on preventing or ameliorating loneliness in old age, and improving the quality of the lived experience of persons with dementia and those who are at the end of life About forty percent of communitydwelling older persons experience loneliness, associated with increased morbidity, mortality and dementia . Her team has used a model of factors she developed to develop and test an intervention to decrease loneliness among community dwelling older persons .

Prof. Cohen -Mansfield, PhD, is in the Department of Health Promotion in the School of Public Health. She holds the Igor Orenstein Chair for the Study of Geriatrics. Cohen -Mansfield studied statistics and psychology at the Hebrew University and clinical psychology at State University of New York at Stony Brook, followed by a post-doc at New York University Medical Center Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. She was awarded a Distinguished Scientist Award by the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry, and ranked 12 th in the world in the field of Geriatrics according to a study by Stanford University in 2020. Prof. Cohen -Mansfield is the Director of the Minerva Center for Interdisciplinary Study of End of Life.

To reduce such experiences, she has studied group activities for persons with dementia and are now conducting a trial of activity kits her team developed for recreational activity workers, with the goal of enabling them to provide more social and stimulating activities for older persons with dementia . With regards to end of life, CohenMansfield has developed an app to improve communication between staff who care for persons at the end of their lives and family members .