Abstract
The twenty-first century is witnessing an unparalleled historical increase in longevity worldwide and particularly in Western, industrialized countries (e.g., Oeppen & Vaupel, 2002; United Nations, 2019). Moreover, despite wealth-related disparities, people generally do not only live longer, but they also live more years in better physical health than at earlier historical times (Harper, 2019). Accordingly, a majority of older adults maintains high levels of functioning in their everyday lives. However, on average, aging remains related to declines in physical and mental health, with a sharp increase in the number of health-related problems in old and particularly in very old age (Barnett et al., 2012), and an increase in chronic multimorbidity (Koné Pefoyo et al., 2015). Based on the biopsychosocial understanding of health, it is not necessarily the physical health alone that defines if people are healthy. Given that many older people are able to maintain a high level of everyday functioning despite illnesses, the World Health Organization (WHO) proposed a definition of “healthy aging” that takes the specific situation of older people into account, namely as “The process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age” (“World report on aging and health,” WHO, 2015, p. 28), where functional ability denotes the “attributes that enable people to be and to do what they have reason to value” (p. 28). Thus, if we want to understand “healthy aging,” we need to understand what it is that people “have reason to value” into very old age, and how they can attain and maintain these valued aspects of their lives. In this article, we present our position that these questions are best answered with the theoretical constructs and approaches provided by motivation science. Motivation science investigates what it is that people desire and dislike or even fear, how these desires, dislikes, and fears are transformed into goals, how people go about pursuing these goals successfully or disengage from them if necessary, and how these processes change over time. In short, we maintain that motivation is the royal road to understanding healthy aging. In this article, we attempt to lay the foundations of a motivational model of healthy aging (see Figure 1).