Contemporary psychotherapy addresses behavioral issues of an older adult by focusing on the degree to which an older adult is able to cope positively with the environmental stressors converging on him or her. An environmental geropsychologist focuses on the environment component of Lewin’s equation and develops interventions to change older adults’ interpersonal and intrapersonal experiences with psychosocial stressors with interventions aimed at the environment. The theory of affordances states that the perceptions that older adults have of their physical environments have functional significance for older adults, and shape older adults’ behaviors. The tri-dimensional intervention model states that there is a comprehensive interaction among the cognitive, conative, and affective components in an older adult’s environment. All three components are the targets for intervention by an environmental geropsychologist. The conative component is the aspect of the brain that acts on one’s thoughts and feelings.

Psychologists work with micro-level and macro-level orientations. Clinical psychologists with a micro-level orientation focus on individuals, families, and small groups when performing psychotherapy. Community psychologists have a macro-level orientation. The aging population presents many opportunities for psychologists, both those engaged in scholarship and those working clinically with older adults, and for community psychologists addressing issues relating to social structures and organized communities of older adults, economic issues such as poverty and access to medical services, and issues relating to senior housing. Contemporary theory indicates that it is equally important for psychologists working with older adults to focus on the positive aspects of aging when addressing the psychopathological problems older adults are experiencing. Erikson’s stage theory originally had seven stages: basic trust versus basic mistrust; autonomy versus shame and doubt; initiative versus guilt; industry versus inferiority; identity versus role confusion; intimacy versus isolation; and generativity versus stagnation.

The aim of applied research on depressive disorders is to stimulate the development of treatments for these conditions and to evaluate their efficacy. The role of mental health care systems is to facilitate access to these treatments including interventions focused on ameliorating symptoms and preventive approaches intended to forestall their development. Intervention research focuses on testing which interventions are successful at treating various clinical problems in the population. For conditions such as depressive disorders, they are evaluated by the magnitude of change in symptoms and functioning measures among patients who receive the intervention, compared to patients who are exposed to some condition. Treatments for unipolar and bipolar depressive disorders take many forms including psychotherapies and biological interventions such as medicines and electroconvulsive therapy. Among the most studied and best validated psychotherapies for depressive disorders are those that use behavioral and cognitive techniques to target symptoms and maintaining factors in the depressive disorders.

This chapter provides some ways to classify jokes into categories, discusses some theories about what makes something funny, and get into the caveats about why this work can be so difficult. This information can lay the groundwork for humor’s role in communication, personality, health, thought, and the like. Comedy alters mood, thought, stress, and pain. Jokes and laughter may play an important role in health, mental illness, marital bliss, education, and psychotherapy. Although a comprehensive model that explains every funny thing in the world would be quite complicated, humor definitely lends itself to study. Cynicism aside, experiments on comedy and mirth have generated amazing insights in the arts and sciences, leading to new ways to recognize, generate, and use funny material. As ubiquitous and intuitive as comedy seems to be, the grand theory and explanation of all humor remain elusive.

Research offers more support for humor’s impact on psychological well-being than on physical health. The area of humor and its effect on serious mental illness deserves further work. A chortle or two and a good sense of humor also seem to help emotional well-being in folks involved in psychotherapy, whether or not they might qualify for a diagnosis. Based on the assumption that humor can improve mental health, psychotherapists of nearly every ilk have recommended comedy. Some see it as a skill that therapists should develop or as a technique to use in therapy at certain times. A handful of therapists think of humor as a treatment itself. All agree that it’s a double-edged sword, warning that caustic humor has no place in the process of therapy. Appropriate humor seems as if it could enhance empathy, warmth, and genuineness. Affiliative humor, the kind that brings people together, certainly sounds apt.