A Broader Perspective on Three Lifespan Theories: Comment on Boerner and Jopp

Key WordsAssimilative and accommodative coping ؒ Lifespan theories of developmental regulation ؒ Metamodel of selection, optimization, and compensation ؒ Model of optimization in primary and secondary control Why do some people develop 'better' or 'more successfully' than others?This question has intrigued psychologists and philosophers for a long time.The advancement of modern lifespan psychology in the 1980s has brought momentum to theoretical elaborations of two aspects: what is successful development?, and which regulatory processes underlie successful development?To date, none of these questions has been answered in a way that is generally accepted.Several theoretical accounts have evolved around each [for an overview, see Freund & Riediger, 2003], often, however, without explicitly relating to each other.Focusing on the second of the aspects -regulatory processes contributing to adaptive development -Boerner and Jopp (this issue) provide one of the rare attempts to systematically analyze and compare contemporary theoretical positions and a selection of relevant empirical findings.Rather than trying to be extensive -and we agree that less is more in this respect -Boerner and Jopp focus on three of the currently most prominent theoretical approaches: the model of assimilative and accommodative coping (proposed by Brandtstädter and colleagues), the model of optimization in primary and secondary control (OPS; proposed by Heckhausen and Schulz), and the metamodel of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC; proposed by Paul and Margret Baltes and collaborators).Further in line with a 'less is more' perspective, Boerner and Jopp restrict their comparative efforts to a specific context: how do people deal with major life change and loss?As a result of their analysis, they propose an overarching twoprocess framework that subsumes the developmental-regulatory mechanisms postulated by the three theories under the categories improvement/maintenance and reorientation .We agree that a comparison of these to date relatively unrelated theories of developmental regulation requires a certain degree of selectiveness and simplification.We also see, however, that this may come at the cost of cutting back the delineation