ABSTRACT
AN UNDERSTANDING of health, and the prevention of illness, requires consideration of psychological and environmental as well as of biomedical factors (Whitman, chapter 1, this volume). Thus, optimal models for understanding and predicting health and illness must be multifactorial. As if that challenge were not enough, models must also be rooted in a developmental perspective to account for variations in health. A life-span perspective is especially appropriate for the study of health, because health and risk for morbidity are fundamental parameters of the course of life, with relative health and risk for illness changing throughout the life span. That is, relations among health, illness, and psychological processes are dynamic and changing as individuals progress from infancy, to early childhood, to childhood, to adolescence, to early adulthood, to middle age, and to later life (chapters 5 to 11, this volume). Put another way, risk factors, stressors, coping resources, and protective factors vary in their relations to health and illness as a function of developmental status and individual differences in patterns of development. Furthermore, processes and events in early life are inevitably related to outcomes in later life (chapters 2 to 4, this volume), so that even if a perfect “snapshot” of biopsychoenvironmental processes were possible at a given age, it could yield no better than an incomplete picture of patterns and causes contributing to an individual’s present health status.
