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Strategies for Promoting Successful Aging and Well-Being

Now more than ever, with an aging population across the globe, and more people aging into the ranks of the “oldest old,” we need high-quality research on strategies to support successful aging and well-being across the life course. Supporting people in achieving their best possible health and quality of life as they age requires much more than what happens within a medical setting. Instead, we need policies and programs in place to support individuals in all aspects of their lives and that address the broad social determinants of health. This Special Issue of the Journal of Applied Gerontology offers empirical work from researchers around the world with insights into how to best promote successful aging and wellbeing by focusing on community-level resources, physical activity, social connectedness, and relationships. The first article, from Joseph Sharit and Sara Czaja, presents translational work discussing how to help older adults address and overcome challenges in learning new skills. The authors provide an overview of the human information processing system and then offer specific examples of how it might be applied in helping older adults learn. A thoughtful and applied understanding of how to support new learning at all ages is essential for helping individuals age successfully, as new life stages will come with new challenges to overcome, and this article offers concrete recommendations to facilitate such learning. The remaining articles present original research, starting with an exploration of how adults of age 80 years and older define successful aging in China from Lin Chen and colleagues. In this article, the authors use data from nearly 100 in-depth interviews with older adults to identify self-reliance as the main goal of successful aging. The authors find that this goal can be supported with four attributes, three of which are discussed in detail in subsequent articles in this same issue: physical activity, financial security, and community connectedness. This article sets an important tone for the remainder of the issue, reminding readers that the most important definitions of successful aging are those set by older adults themselves. In the next article, Allen Sabey and colleagues demonstrate that older adults are unique across a variety of characteristics, compared with their younger counterparts. But, they show as much capacity for clinical change in therapeutic settings as younger adults, indicating that it is possible to work toward positive well-being at any age, and that it is especially important to take into account individual and community characteristics, as the next set of articles does. The next three articles examine various correlates of successful aging and well-being in different settings: rural Italy, urban and suburban Colombia, and Taiwan. The first of these, from Francesca Cecchi and colleagues, found that better functioning among nonagenarians (age 90 years and older) was associated with a variety of potentially modifiable factors, including physical activity and weight, pharmacology, and depressive symptoms. These findings provide promising insights into how to support people in successful aging well into older ages; however, doing so requires attention to their access to resources, as the next two articles demonstrate. Using data from a sample of older adults in Colombia, Maria-Fernanda Reyes and colleagues connect life satisfaction and well-being in older ages with higher socioeconomic status. Meanwhile, Yu-I Pen and Yun-Shan Chan show that regular internet use is associated with healthier lifestyles among adults in Taiwan. Taken together, these articles suggest that individual behavior is important for successful aging, but that access to resources plays a strong role in defining one’s opportunities for healthy aging. The following four articles all examine various aspects of physical activity as it relates to mental and physical wellbeing. They also examine ways in which physical activity among older adults is associated with individual and community characteristics. Simone Pettigrew and colleagues used data from Australian older adults to show a relationship between housing type and physical activity; this relationship also appeared in the article by Song-lee Hong and colleagues, which demonstrated relationships between various contextual and demographic characteristics and physical activity among older adults in Singapore. The articles from Jaehyun Kim and colleagues and Samantha Brady and colleagues make a strong case for the importance of focusing on social cohesion and connectedness in efforts to promote physical activity and well-being among older adults. Kim et al. used nationally-representative data from the United States to show relationships between neighborhood social cohesion, physical activity, and mental health. Brady et al. used data from an insurance provider to show relationships between fitness class membership, increased physical activity, better health, and decreased social isolation and loneliness. It is often taken for granted that physical activity is a necessary component of healthy aging. Indeed, these articles suggest a strong relationship between increased 894746 JAGXXX10.1177/0733464819894746Journal of Applied Gerontology editorial2019