ABSTRACT
This question of what makes for healthy ageing becomes all the more important when we consider the unprecedented rate at which societies today are ageing. Psychological approaches to healthy ageing tend to focus on those factors that help older people understand and cope with the challenges that ageing can pose to their health. The more influential of these have examined the role of personality and social isolation on health and longevity and have explored ways to modify behaviour with a view to improving health outcomes. Prominent among work that has sought to identify psychological determinants of healthy ageing is evidence that individual differences have the capacity to predict how long we will live. Not least, this is because whether or not a person sees themselves as having a health problem and seeks professional help to address it, depends in large part on their experience and interpretation of health-related symptoms.
