Developmental approach to psychosocial risk factors and successful aging

Successful aging has been characterized as maintaining physical health (avoiding disease), sustaining good cognitive function, and having active engagement with other people and productive activities (Rowe 8c Kahn, 1998). Although these three factors are known to be interrelated, the field has largely examined physical health outcomes as primary and separate from cognitive outcomes, with active social engagement as a predictor of physical health and occasionally cognitive functioning. In this chapter we take a more transactional perspective to these factors of successful aging, understanding how they interact throughout the lifespan to create developmental trajectories of varying levels of success.