[Aging and life-history: aims and approaches to a life-span oriented gerontology]

The paper discusses the contributions of American theoretical and empirical approaches in life span developmental psychology to the understand of aging in a life-span frame of reference. The main part of the paper consists of a report on longitudinal as well as biographical studies on psychological and social development in adolescence, middle, and late adulthood which started at the Psychology Department of the University of Bonn in 1952 and are continued into the 80's. These studies point to close relationships between the social and psychological conditions in earlier and later periods of life and stress the relevance of promoting not only mental, but also social and effective-emotional competence for the coping with crisis situation in old age.