Adolescent health psychology

In this article, a biopsychosocial model of adolescent development is used as an organizing framework for a review of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention research with adolescent populations. During adolescence many critical health behaviors emerge, affecting future disease outcomes in adulthood. In addition, most of the predominant causes of morbidity and mortality in adolescence are unique to this period of development, indicating that health-focused interventions must be tailored specifically to adolescents. Moreover, it is during adolescence that lifelong patterns of self-management of and adjustment to chronic health conditions are established. Thus, an increased focus on adolescence in health psychology research is important both to improve the health of adolescents per se and to optimize health trajectories into adulthood. Adolescence has historically been a developmental period of relative neglect with respect to research on both mental and phys-ical health intervention and outcome. Perhaps such neglect has occurred because, from a health perspective, morbidity and mor-tality rates are quite low during adolescence compared with other developmental periods (Holden & Nitz, 1995). However, as w