ABSTRACT
There are two important assumptions being made in a paper dealing with psychosocial interventions in aging. The first is that it is possible to intervene in ways that can reverse or alter factors thought to be associated with the aging process per se or with common experiences to which most older people are exposed. The second is that these interventions can be psychosocial in nature, that is, manipulating psychological, behavioral, or environmental variables rather than biomedical ones. We contend that there is some evidence for both of these important assertions, although surprisingly the data are far less persuasive than one might suspect, given the great enthusiasm for the possibility of intervention that has been expressed in the field (cf. Fozard & Popkin, 1978; Poon, Fozard, & Treat, 1978). Our examination of the literature revealed that several of the intervention studies lack outcome measures, making it impossible to evaluate whether many of the very interesting approaches that have been tried actually have any measurable, not to mention clinically significant, effects. Furthermore, most intervention studies in this area lack a conceptual view of the process of aging, and almost all of them fail to take what we would characterize as a biopsychosocial approach.
