All too often traumatic exposure and its effects receive little or no consideration in studies of adult development and aging. This is perplexing, as evidence has shown that for a large number of individuals in the general population, trauma has harmful physical, social, and psychological effects. This conundrum has led some researchers to call traumatic exposure and its effects “hidden variables” in the lives of older adults (Nichols and Czirr, 1986; Spiro et al., 1994). When many professionals and the general public do give consideration to the consequences of traumatic exposure, they almost always equate them with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This assumption is only partially correct. Trauma can evoke heterogeneity of psychological symptoms. In fact, Herman (1992) suggests that responses to trauma are best understood as a spectrum of conditions rather than as a single disorder. Those in the field of geropsychology must be made aware that although the prevalence of full diagnostic criteria for PTSD is relatively low in older adults, there are other long-term psychological effects of traumatic exposure that require assessment and treatment. In fact many health practitioners could benefit from increased understanding of trauma in older adults. Misattribution of older adults’ trauma-related symptoms can have serious implications for treatment and recovery, such as the design of inappropriate or inadequate treatment plans, administration of ineffective psychotherapy treatments, dispensing of unnecessary medications, or costly, inefficient medical intervention (Allers et al., 1992). Although there are several excellent special issues of journals devoted to the topic of trauma among older adults in the past two decades (Blau, 1997; Elder and Clipp, 1994; The aging survivors of the Holocaust, 1981; Wigder, 1997), there is a need for an update. The recent terrorist attacks in this country and abroad will no doubt lead to further research on and clinical practice of retraumatization and its effects. The goal of this special issue is to highlight some of the most innovative research and clinical endeavors occurring in the field of geriatric trauma in the hopes of stimulating greater interest in and exploration of this topic. One of the strengths of these papers lies in their diversity. The papers address a broad range of topics from prevalence and phenomenology to treatment in older adult survivors of traumas with various types and durations of exposure (e.g., Holocaust, natural disaster, combat, prisoner of war, rape and childhood abuse).