Personality and Healthy Aging in Adulthood: New Directions and Techniques

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.

Dr. Hill received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in Psychology, and is currently an Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on understanding how dispositional traits predict and shape trajectories of healthy aging. His current research is focused on helping individuals explore options for and ultimately commit to a purpose for life, and how having a sense of purpose predicts important life outcomes. His research program considers these questions with the intent of promoting healthy development from adolescence into older adulthood.

Dr. Allemand received his PhD from the University of Zurich in Psychology, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology and member of the University Research Priority Program Dynamics of Healthy Aging of the University of Zurich. His research interests are in four closely linked areas: personality development across the lifespan, personality dynamics and processes in daily life, personality assessment in the laboratory and in daily life, and personality intervention approaches. His work uses samples ranging from adolescence to late adulthood and longitudinal and intensive longitudinal research methods.