Personality and Healthy Aging in Adulthood

Book excerpt: This book highlights international efforts to better understand the role of individual differences in healthy aging by exploring new directions, methods, and questions within the field. The book considers how to measure personality and personality change during adulthood, the associations between personality and healthy aging outcomes over time, and the role of personality in building interventions to promote healthy aging. The first section considers the value of personality constructs for healthy aging outcomes beyond the broad Big Five personality dimensions. It discusses the role of attachment, purpose, and affect, and also touches on the issue of psychopathology. The second section presents innovative assessment methods, research designs beyond classical longitudinal approaches, as well as sophisticated and integrative techniques for analyzing personality change processes. The third section raises new important questions, such as how interventionists from non-personality domains can incorporate personality processes in their intervention programs. It also discusses how different domains of individual functioning may interact in concert to predict healthy aging outcomes, as well as how more integrative lifespan models of healthy aging may advance research on personality and healthy aging. Overall, this book will spark interest and chart new directions for researchers, practitioners and interventionists in healthy aging, gerontology and applied fields.