Beliefs about aging affect memory test performance, today and 38 years later

This is the third in a series of posts based on Becca Levy’s book Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live.

*******

When research participants over the age of 60 were subliminally primed with words associated with wisdom, e.g., sage, accomplished, astute, they performed better on memory tests. When primed with words associated with senility, e.g., dementia, confused, decrepit, the participants performed worse. When younger participants were primed with the same words, they showed no difference in memory test performance (B. Levy, 1996).

While that study demonstrated a short-term effect, Levy wondered how this would play out over a lifetime. Her daughter helpfully suggested that she use a time machine to go back many years to find out what people believed about aging before returning to the present to find out what those same people believed now (B. Levy, 2022). While a time machine would certainly speed up longitudinal research, our physicists have not yet created such a machine, as far as I know.

Levy did the next best thing. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) started in 1958. Their over 3,200 participants (About the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, 2018) are assessed with a battery of physical and cognitive tests every one to four years (BLSA Study Design and Measures, 2023). Levy learned that in its very first year, the researchers included the Attitude Toward Older Persons scale (B. Levy, 2022). Let’s pause for a minute to consider what a gold mine Levy discovered. In 1958, research participants shared their attitudes about aging, and then over the next 38 years, those same research participants took a whole host of memory tests. What Levy found was nothing short of remarkable (B. R. Levy et al., 2012). She writes, “[P]eople who held positive age beliefs from the outset went on to experience 30 percent better memory scores in old age than their peers with negative age beliefs…[T]his was even greater than the influence of other factors on memory such as age, physical health, and years of education” (B. Levy, 2022, p. 37).

Because the BLSA is an observational study, we don’t know for certain that attitudes about aging in early life caused strong memory test performance. However, when those results are combined with the experimental research, such as Levy’s 1996 priming study that opened this article, it gives one pause.

Fostering positive attitudes about aging in traditionally-aged college students could result in those same students having a much higher quality of life when they reach older adulthood.

While both of Levy’s studies discussed here would fit well in the Intro Psych lifespan chapter, they would also work in the research methods chapter as an example of how experimental and correlational research can work together to help researchers better understand people.

References

About the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. (2018, July 27). National Institute on Aging. https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/labs/blsa/about

BLSA study design and measures. (2023, February 22). National Institute on Aging. https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/labs/blsa/study-design-and-measures

Levy, B. (1996). Improving memory in old age through implicit self-stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(6), 1092–1107.

Levy, B. (2022). Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live (First edition). William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Levy, B. R., Zonderman, A. B., Slade, M. D., & Ferrucci, L. (2012). Memory shaped by age stereotypes over time. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 67(4), 432–436. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbr120