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Study: Accentuate the Positive
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Business New Haven
8/19/2002
By: Melissa Nicefaro
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NEW HAVEN - Thinking positively about getting older extends one's life by more than seven years - more than the longevity gained from low blood pressure or low cholesterol or by maintaining a healthy weight, abstaining from smoking and exercising regularly, a study by a Yale researcher has found.
“We found that those individuals who reported more positive self perceptions of aging demonstrated significantly longer survival than those who reported more negative self perceptions of aging,” said Becca Levy, assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and lead author of the study published in the August issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Unlike members of minority groups, who have been targeted from childhood, stereotypes about aging are acquired decades before the person becomes old and are therefore rarely questioned, the researchers said.
“Once individuals become older, they may lack the defenses of other groups to ward off the impact of negative stereotypes on self perceptions,” the authors said. For example, Levy has found in her previous research that depending on whether elderly persons are prompted to see themselves as “wise” or “senile,” they will experience enhanced or compromised memory performance, will to live, cardiovascular response to stress, mathematical performance and views of other older people.
Researchers looked at how 338 men and 322 women 50 years old and older responded to several statements about aging in 1975, and then examined how their responses predicted their survival up to 23 years later. An example of one of the self-perception of aging statements was: “As you get older, you are less useful.”
The researchers found that those respondents with more positive views on aging lived longer, even after taking into account factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, functional health, self-reported health and loneliness.
“We found that the median survival of those in the more positive self-perceptions of aging group was 7.6 years longer than those in the more negative aging self stereotype group,” the authors said.
The effects of attitudes about aging had a greater impact on survival than low blood pressure and cholesterol, each of which is associated with a longer life span of about four years. The attitudes about aging also had a greater impact on longevity than lower body mass index, not smoking and regular exercise - each of which extends life by one to three years.
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