A recent study finds that older adults feel younger when they feel that they have more control over their daily lives, regardless of stress or health concerns. However, stress and health — not a sense of control — play a significant role in how old younger adults feel.
“We recently found that there are things older adults can do to improve their feelings of control in their everyday lives,” said Shevaun Neupert, PhD, FGSA, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University and co-author of a paper on the work. “Now this study highlights how those feelings of control influence perceptions of age. The more control older adults think they have, the younger they feel.”
For this study, researchers had 116 older adults (ages 60 to 90) and 107 younger adults (ages 18 to 36) fill out a daily survey for eight consecutive days. Study participants were asked questions aimed at assessing their daily stresses, physical health, sense of control over their daily lives, and how old they felt.
“Everyone’s sense of control fluctuates from day to day, or even over the course of a day — that’s normal,” Neupert said. “We found that when older adults felt more in control, they also felt younger. That was true even when accounting for stress and physical health.”
However, an individual’s sense of control had no bearing on self-perceptions of age for young adults. But stress and adverse changes in health did make young people feel older.
“This highlights the importance of having older adults retain some sense of autonomy,” Neupert said. “It’s not just a nice thing to do, it actually affects their well-being.”
The paper, “Feeling Young and in Control: Daily Control Beliefs are associated with Younger Subjective Ages,” is published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences. The first author is Jennifer Bellingtier, PhD, a former doctoral student at NC State who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. The work was done with support from NC State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
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The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences is a peer-reviewed publication of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation’s oldest and largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to research, education, and practice in the field of aging. The principal mission of the Society — and its 5,500+ members — is to advance the study of aging and disseminate information among scientists, decision makers, and the general public. GSA’s structure also includes a policy institute, the National Academy on an Aging Society, and an educational unit, the Academy for Gerontology in Higher Education.
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