This longitudinal study investigated the relationship between retirement transitions and subsequent psychological well-being using data on 458 married men and women (aged 50-72 years) who were either still in their primary career jobs, retired, or had just made the transition to retirement over the preceding 2 years. The findings show that the relationship between retirement and psychological well-being must be viewed in a temporal, life course context. Specifically, making the transition to retirement within the last 2 years is associated with higher levels of morale for men, whereas being "continuously" retired is related to greater depressive symptoms among men. The results suggest the importance of examining various resources and contexts surrounding retirement transitions (gender, prior level of psychological well-being, spouses' circumstance, and changes in personal control, marital quality, subjective health, and income adequacy) to understand the dynamics of the retirement transition and its relationship with psychological well-being.

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Successful Aging such difficulties quite early in life. Most important, many people deal well with particular afflictions, while others with the same difficulties become functionally impaired. While there are diverse definitions of health, we prefer to consider health as a multidimensional continuum, rather than a dichotomy, and in terms of functional abilities and the absence of chronic disease in addition to subjective assessments of one's fitness (Antonovsky 1987). One promising corollary, and possible precursor, of health in later adulthood is social integration in the form of involvement in multiple roles. Occupying multiple roles-such as worker, club member, and churchgoer-has been positively linked to health and to longevity (Berkman and Breslow 1983; House, Landis, and Umberson 1988; Moen, Dempster-McClain, and Williams 1989). Such multiple-role occupancy may be especially important in later adulthood, a time when role reduction, rather than role accumulation, becomes increasingly common in our culture (Morgan 1988). However, cross-sectional research linking health with social integration, defined as "the existence or quantity of social ties or relationships," is problematic because the direction of effects is unclear (House, Umberson, and Landis 1988, p. 302). As Verbrugge (1983) points out, the issue is one of social causation versus social selection. Social causation assumes that social integration (occupying multiple roles) influences health.2 By contrast, social selection assumes that healthy people are the ones most likely to take on and maintain multiple social roles. But the social causation versus social selection argument is less crucial than an understanding of the pathways to health and social integration in later adulthood. Causation and selection are probably both operating simultaneously and interactively in a dynamic cascade of events over the life course. Successful aging probably encompasses both social integration (multiple roles) and health in the later years of life. What is required is a dynamic approach to health and social integration, to examine the extent to which experiences throughout the life course shape physical abilities and involvement in multiple roles later in life (e.g., Riley and Riley 1989; Rowe and Kahn 1987). Such an approach is especially important when looking at women's lives, since women's social integration into the larger society has been circumscribed by the primacy of their family obligations (Hughes and Gove 1981). Women are also more likely than men to spend their later adulthood alone, without the presence (and support) of a spouse. Aging women are particularly susceptible to social isolation as they leave or lose

This article introduces the special section on sexual harassment at work. It discusses the importance of sexual harassment as a continuing, chronic occupational health psychology problem to which the public health and preventive medicine notions of prevention may be applied. The article discusses the dilemmas in conducting and reviewing research on harassment, briefly examining some alternative methods of inquiry. The three articles in this section are introduced and the contrasting legal views of the problems in Europe and the United States are addressed. The preventive management of sexual harassment is suggested.

The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic’s effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic’s implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic’s social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic’s short- and long-term consequences unfold.