Alive and Well: The State of Behavioral Gerontology in 2011

In this paper, the authors present a brief personal account of the senior author's 30 years of exploration in behavioral gerontology. The main thesis of the paper is that behavioral methods and interventions have found a home both in mainstream gerontology and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are three sections: (a) a personal vignette discussing the problems inherent in using operant terminology in a nonoperant world; (b) a discussion, with examples from NIH sources, of the Institutes' views on behavior change; and (c) using Burgio and Burgio (1986) as a reference point, the authors show evidence of progress and vitality of behavioral gerontology in 2011.