ABSTRACT
Age has long played a central role in health psychology because age has potential interactions with all the important causal and mediating variables of interest in health psychology. Age is also a major risk factor for most chronic diseases (Siegler, Bosworth, & Elias, 2003). In the previous edition of this chapter, women’s health and the menopausal transition was of major concern (Siegler, Bastian, & Bosworth, 2001). In the past seven years, the literature in health psychology that deals with aging has exploded, as is evidenced by other chapters in this volume that have aging content: age and defi nitions of illness (Leventhal et al., Chapter 1, this volume), caregiving (Martire & Schulz, Chapter 13, this volume), religion and spirituality (Park, Chapter 18, this volume), gender and age (Helgeson, Chapter 22, this volume), coping processes in social context (Revenson & Lepore, Chapter 9, this volume), and personality and coronary heart disease (CHD; T. W. Smith, Gallo, Shivpuri, & Brewer, Chapter 17, this volume). In addition, physical and mental health disparities are linked to age and culture in morbidity and mortality in the United States (Jackson, Antonucci, & Brown, 2004) and the global community (NIA, 2007). Development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-5 (DSM-5) is also leading to an interest in understanding age considerations in psychiatric diagnoses (Jeste, Blazer, & First, 2007), with additional complications in medically ill elderly psychiatric patients (Katz & Ganzini, 2007). Other volumes present important reviews that readers of this chapter may want to consult: Handbook of Health Psychology and Aging (Aldwin, Park, & Spiro, 2007); Recent Advances in Psychology and Aging (Costa & Siegler, 2004), Neuropsychology of Cardiovascular Disease (Waldstein & Elias, 2001), Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics focused on centenarian studies (Poon & Perls, 2007) and the epidemiology of aging (Fried, 2000). There has also been a methodological revolution in the application of sophisticated latent-variable-modeling techniques (Bosworth & Hertzog, 2009; Hertzog & Nesselroade, 2003).
