Trust the process: Introduction to the special issue on age-related processes in daily life

Research on aging and adult development often considers how individuals change over the course of years or decades, helping us to characterize patterns of development throughout adulthood. However, accumulating research has highlighted the importance of looking at aging at a more proximal process level, capturing how the lives of adults play out across weeks, days, or even moments. These process-based investigations have provided rich insights into what the aging process looks like "in-between" the traditional longer term assessments. This special issue highlights the rich, contextual work that aging and adult development researchers are undertaking at the process level. These articles underscore both that process-oriented research is feasible across multiple constructs, populations, and environments, as well as that such work can provide novel insights into adult development. The current article introduces the special issue by discussing the challenges and opportunities available to adult development researchers who strive to understand the processes underlying the aging process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).