This is the fourth 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.
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In my last post, I wrote about how beliefs about aging can affect memory now and even a whopping 38 years later. Researchers have found similar results for physical functioning.
Becca Levy and colleagues “found that those with more positive self-perceptions of aging in 1975 reported better functional health from 1977 to 1995, when we controlled for baseline measures of functional health, self-rated health, age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status” (B. R. Levy et al., 2002). Was it just that those with better functional health were more likely to have more positive age beliefs? Nope. Age beliefs predicted later functional health; functional health did not predict age beliefs.
If you’re sharing this research with students, invite students to work in small groups to create an operational definition of functional health. For that study, researchers used the Health Scale for the Aged (Rosow & Breslau, 1966). With only a few questions, it provides a self-assessment of functional health. For example, are you healthy enough, on your own, to walk up and down stairs or to walk half a mile. If you’re unable to access the original paper for the scale, Google Images returned an image of the scale that was published in a more recent article (Slaninka & Galbraith, 2013).
Since the longitudinal study Levy and colleagues conducted was correlational, they wondered if functional health could be improved with a priming intervention in an experiment. Research participants over the age of 60 were subliminally primed with words associated with positive age stereotypes seven times over an eight-week period. Over the course of the study, the participants’ physical functioning (observed performance of strength, gait, and balance tasks) improved as compared to participants in the control group who received neutral primes. In turn, as the study progressed, the positive-prime participants expressed fewer negative attitudes about aging (B. R. Levy et al., 2014). When older adults are fed positive messages about aging, they regain physical functioning which results in fewer negative attitudes about aging.
Levy and colleagues conducted one more longitudinal study. Again, the results were nothing short of remarkable. Volunteers who were 70 years old and older were interviewed monthly for 129 months. At the beginning of the study, they were asked “When you think of old persons, what are the first 5 words or phrases that come to mind?” (B. R. Levy et al., 2012, p. 1972). Responses were coded, and participants were assigned a score from 1 (most negative) to 5 (most positive). Now, here’s the thing. Lots of bad stuff can happen to people in 129 months. The researchers selected a sample of 598 people from this larger study. To be included in the sample, the participants had to have experienced in those 10 plus years at least one month of disability (required help with bathing, dressing, walking, or moving from bed to chair). Get this. “Older persons with positive age stereotypes were 44% more likely to fully recover from severe disability than those with negative age stereotypes” (B. R. Levy et al., 2012, p. 1973).
“Age beliefs can be a source of security and strength as older people go through disability and eventual recovery” (B. Levy, 2022, p. 56). As I wrote in an earlier post, “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.” The impact, however, may be even more immediate. If one of your 18-year-old students adopts more positive attitudes about aging, their attitudes may affect the attitudes of their parents and grandparents.
References
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., Pilver, C., Chung, P. H., & Slade, M. D. (2014). Subliminal strengthening: Improving older individuals’ physical function over time with an implicit-age-stereotype intervention. Psychological Science, 25(12), 2127–2135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614551970
Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., & Kasl, S. V. (2002). Longitudinal benefit of positive self-perceptions of aging on functional health. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 57(5), P409–P417. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/57.5.P409
Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Murphy, T. E., & Gill, T. M. (2012). Association between positive age stereotypes and recovery from disability in older persons. JAMA, 308(19), 1972–1973. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.14541
Rosow, I., & Breslau, N. (1966). A Guttman Health Scale for the Aged. Journal of Gerontology, 21(4), 556–559. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronj/21.4.556
Slaninka, S. C., & Galbraith, A. M. (2013). Healthy endings: A collaborative health promotion project for the elderly. Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 24(9), 35–42. https://doi.org/10.3928/0098-9134-19980901-12
