Editor's Choice
The Silver Century Foundation is committed to producing articles of merit on significant subjects that have to do with aging. They will appear in this space.
Every day, there are news stories and other reports about aspects of aging, and the range of topics is extraordinary. We learn that companies all over the world are trying to adapt to an aging workforce. Scientists are attempting to lengthen our life span. Clinical psychologists consider the problems couples face in later life a hot topic. A novelist shows us how the worlds of aging and the circus intersect. A new study finds that over the past 20 years, the number of people who experience disabilities in old age has decreased. The list of topics goes on and on, and over time SCF will consider many of them.
The Power of Positive Aging
Your beliefs about aging can affect how long you live. If you assume that the later years of your life will inevitably be a depressing time of physical and mental decline, you’re apt to die about seven years sooner than people who have more positive expectations.
The research that produced this startling finding is the latest in a series of studies led by psychologist Becca R. Levy of Yale University – explorations of the insidious ways in which ageism affects older people. To investigate its impact on longevity, Levy and her colleagues built on data collected in 1975.
In that year, 660 older residents of Oxford, Ohio answered questions about their attitudes toward their own aging. They were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with statements such as, "Things keep getting worse as I get older," "I have as much pep as I did last year," “As you get older, you are less useful,” and "I am as happy now as I was when I was younger."
In 1998, almost 23 years later, Levy’s team checked to see which of the participants had died and when. They found that those who viewed their own aging positively lived about seven and a half years longer than those with a more negative outlook. The researchers were able to rule out other factors that could have accounted for the difference in longevity, such as the participants’ gender (women tend to survive longer than men do), their age or the state of their health. Their attitude to aging had a greater impact on how long they survived than any of those things. In addition, those who felt more positive about growing older functioned better over the years – they were able to get around more easily, to walk and climb stairs, etc.
Can a mindset really make such a difference? Levy’s body of work demonstrates that it can.
Many people absorb negative stereotypes of aging and of older people early in life. As children, they come to assume that all elders are frail and often confused and that old age is a miserable experience to endure. Throughout their lives, the media reinforces these ideas. Small wonder, then, that when they reach later life, their stereotypes of aging can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: they become weak, helpless, confused, etc., partly because that’s what they expect. Often, elders aren’t aware that they’ve turned their own biases against themselves because those biases are so ingrained that they operate on some level beneath awareness.
How do you investigate attitudes that aren’t really conscious? Levy has used an ingenious approach. She recognized that people harbor positive stereotypes of elders (wise old person), as well as negative ones (doddering old fool), though the negatives are more common. She found a way to activate each stereotype and then measure the impact on people’s behavior.
In a long line of experiments, Levy and her colleagues had participants sit at a computer. They were told that a light would flash on and off quickly, and that they were to indicate whether it was above or below a bullseye on the screen. In reality, the flash of light contained a word. Because it vanished so quickly, subjects were never consciously aware that there was a word, but on some level below awareness they caught its meaning. This is called subliminal priming.
Some participants were primed with a series of negative words associated with aging (“senile,” for example) and others with positive words, such as “wise.” After the priming, they were given memory tests or other tasks to do. Over and over, Levy’s team proved that older people who had been primed with the negative words were at a disadvantage. For example, on four different memory tests they scored poorly compared to those who had been exposed to positive words. When young people were similarly primed, it made no difference to their performance whether they’d been subjected to positive or negative words.
The priming also brought surprising changes in ordinary behavior such as walking and writing. Older people, positively primed, actually walked faster afterward. In fact, their quicker pace was comparable to the speed-up that occurs when elders spend several weeks doing rigorous exercise. As for writing, seniors who had been negatively primed produced handwriting samples that looked shakier and seemed more like the writing of very old people than did samples from seniors who had been treated to an invisible stream of positive words.
Levy’s research also indicates that when older people have a negative self-image related to their age, it can have a direct impact on the way their body functions under stress. When she and her colleagues primed subjects and then gave them tasks to do that were designed to provoke anxiety, such as a math test, the negatively primed showed more signs of stress than the positives – increases in blood pressure and heart rate, for example. What’s more, their stress responses began even before they were confronted by the tasks, apparently in reaction to the subliminal negative messages. This suggests that when negative stereotypes of aging confront elders in everyday life, some find it stressful; it also increases their vulnerability to other kinds of stress. Levy believes that negative self-images may accelerate the development of health problems such as cardiovascular disease.
Another of Levy’s studies indicated that, in troubling ways, age prejudices can affect the will to live. Her team exposed elders to positive or negative subliminal messages and then asked them to answer a series of hypothetical questions. Each question asked what they would do if they had a particular fatal condition but a medical intervention could prolong their life. The hypothetical scenario spelled out either the financial cost or the time family members would need to spend to help out. Would the participant want the intervention? The positively primed tended to accept it, while the negatives tended not to. Younger people were apt to say “yes” to the intervention no matter how they had been primed.
Levy’s work suggests that there are many ways in which ageism can affect elders’ self-image, their lives and their health, but the shocker is still that it can impact longevity. According to research, people can add as much as four years to their life if they keep their cholesterol low. If they can maintain a positive view of aging, that can make a difference of more than seven years. Levy and her colleagues noted that if a new virus were to come along that cut life expectancy by that much, scientists and funders would make a considerable effort to identify it and find a remedy. Since ageism appears to shorten people’s lives significantly, surely it’s time to do something about it.
What Can Be Done about Age Bias?
In the U.S., negative stereotypes of aging and of elders seem to be everywhere, but television programs are particularly noxious. They often ridicule seniors or simply ignore them. Although almost 13 percent of Americans are 65 and older, fewer than 2 percent of the characters on prime-time television are in that age group.
Researchers have found that the more TV people watch, the more negative their views are about elders. Can anything be done to counteract television’s age bias? Another Levy experiment suggests a possible first step.
For this study, the investigators recruited 76 people between 60 and 92 years old and randomly assigned them to a control group or to a group that would be subjected to an intervention that was intended to make them aware of the way television treats older people. The researchers asked members of both groups to record their television viewing for one week in a diary. On average, the participants watched TV for 21 hours a week. As expected, those who spent more time had more negative images of aging.
The intervention group completed an additional page in their diaries each day in which they evaluated the way seniors were presented on the shows they watched. They were asked, for example, to choose one older character from a program they’d seen and say whether that person seemed to be in good physical and mental health. They were also to note what role the individual played and whether it was a major or minor part. The evaluations were intended to make them more aware of TV’s ageism.
The intervention had the desired effect. An 81-year-old man observed, for example, that seniors "shouldn't be targets of jokes so often." A woman, a particularly heavy user of television, reacted to the fact that comedies and dramas rarely include older characters.
“I feel like we’ve been ignored,” she said. “I feel like we’re non-existent.”
At the end of the study, people in the intervention group were more likely than members of the control group to say that in the future they would spend less time watching TV.
The researchers concluded that promoting awareness of age bias on television may be one way to help elders deal with it. Certainly, ageist attitudes will only begin to change when enough people realize that they exist and understand that they can do a lot of harm.
Related Links:
Young @ Heart: Not Going Gently
Word and Image; The Oldest Bias
