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Aging News for Senior Citizens
Hope I die before I get old? Wrong Idea!
Attitudes about aging contradict reality - people become happier over
time
June 13, 2006 - Back when he was 20 years old in
1965, rock star Pete Townshend wrote the line "I hope I die before I get
old" into a song, "My Generation" that launched his band, the Who, onto
the rock 'n' roll scene. But a unique new study suggests that Townshend
may have fallen victim to a common, and mistaken, belief: That the
happiest days of people's lives occur when they're young.
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June 28,2005 - The more senior citizens watch
television, the greater their negative images of aging may be, but
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the Journal of Social Issues.
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How Do Seniors Define Successful Aging?
Older adults perspectives on healthy aging surprises
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Jan. 18, 2006 - Understanding how older adults
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January edition of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
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Senior Citizens Enjoying Health, Life Much Longer
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Dec. 28, 2005 - Older Americans enjoy good health
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testing the effectiveness of interventions in several of these areas
deserves further attention.
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Senior Citizens Do Shrink – Just One of the Body
Changes of Aging
Shrinking height, pot belly, pencil legs - it can be
prevented
Nov. 28, 2005 - As we age, we experience decreases
in everything from hair and hearing to memory and muscle. Height is also
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an inch each decade, with some faster shrinkage after age 70. Senior
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Most Senior Citizens Experience Loneliness, Say
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Nov. 21, 2005 - As the holidays approach,
loneliness becomes the spirit of Christmas present for all too many
older people. Nearly 60 percent of more than 500 senior citizens age 70
or older in this study experience some form of loneliness, according to University of
Michigan researchers. And, in a study to be released in January, they
find friendships are more important than family relationships in
predicting good mental health of seniors 60 and older.
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Simple Test for Seniors, Boomers to Rate Risk of
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Feb. 16, 2006 -
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What do you know about aging?
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The study finds, both young people and older people
think that young people are happier than older people -- when in fact
research has shown the opposite. And while both senior citizens and
younger adults tend to equate old age with unhappiness for other people,
individuals tend to think they'll be happier than most in their old age.
In other words, the young Pete Townshend may have
thought others of his generation would be miserable in old age. And now
that he's 61, he might look back and think he himself was happier back
then. But the opposite is likely to be true: Older people "mis-remember"
how happy they were as youths, just as youths "mis-predict" how happy
(or unhappy) they will be as they age.
The study, performed by VA Ann Arbor Healthcare
System and University of Michigan researchers, involved more than 540
adults who were either between the ages of 21 and 40, or over age 60.
All were asked to rate or predict their own
individual happiness at their current age, at age 30 and at age 70, and
also to judge how happy most people are at those ages. The results are
published in the June issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies, a major
research journal in the field of positive psychology.
"Overall, people got it wrong, believing that most
people become less happy as they age, when in fact this study and others
have shown that people tend to become happier over time," says lead
author Heather Lacey, Ph.D., a VA postdoctoral fellow and member of the
U-M Medical School's Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in
Medicine. "Not only do younger people believe that older people are less
happy, but older people believe they and others must have been happier
'back then'. Neither belief is accurate."
The findings have implications for understanding
young people's decisions about habits -- such as smoking or saving money
-- that might affect their health or finances later in life. They also
may help explain the fear of aging that drives middle-aged people to
"midlife crisis" behavior in a vain attempt to slow their own aging.
Stereotypes about aging abound in our society,
Lacey says, and affect the way older people are treated as well as the
public policies that affect them.
That's why research on the beliefs that fuel those
one-size-fits-all depictions of older people is important, she explains.
The study is one of the first ever to examine the ability of individuals
to remember or predict happiness over the lifespan. Most studies of
happiness have focused on people with chronic illness, disabilities or
other major life challenges, or have taken "snapshots" of current
happiness among older people.
The senior author of the new paper, Peter Ubel,
M.D., has conducted several of these studies, and has found that ill
people are often surprisingly happy, sometimes just as happy as healthy
people. This suggests an adaptability or resilience in the face of their
medical problems. Ubel is the director of the Center for Behavioral and
Decision Sciences in Medicine, an advisor to the RWJ Clinical Scholars
Program, and author of You're Stronger Than You Think: Tapping the
Secrets of Emotionally Resilient People (McGraw-Hill, 2006).
"People often believe that happiness is a matter of
circumstance, that if something good happens, they will experience
long-lasting happiness, or if something bad happens, they will
experience long-term misery," he says. "But instead, people's happiness
results more from their underlying emotional resources -- resources that
appear to grow with age. People get better at managing life's ups and
downs, and the result is that as they age, they become happier -- even
though their objective circumstances, such as their health, decline."
Lacey adds, "It's not that people overestimate
their happiness, but rather that they learn how to value life from
adversities like being sick. What the sick learn from being sick, the
rest of us come to over time." The new study, she explains, sprang from
a desire to see whether the experience that comes with advancing age
affects attitudes and predictions about aging.
The study was done using an online survey with six
questions, asked in four different orders to reduce bias. The
participants were part of large group of individuals who had previously
volunteered to take online surveys, and chose to respond to the U-M/VA
inquiry. The two age groups were about equally divided between men and
women. About 35 percent of the younger group's members were from ethnic
minority groups, compared with 24 percent of the older group's members.
Each participant was asked to rate his or her own
current level of happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, and also to rate on
that same scale how happy an average person of their age would be. Each
participant was also asked to remember or predict (depending on their
age) their level of happiness at age 30 and at age 70, again on a scale
of 1 to 10. They were also asked to guess the happiness of the average
person at each of those ages.
To make sure that their online survey methodology
didn't skew the results by including an atypical group of older people,
the researchers compare the older group's happiness self-ratings with
those from self-ratings collected in other ways from people of the same
age range. They matched.
In all, a statistical analysis of the results show,
people in the older group reported a current level of happiness for
themselves that was significantly higher than the self-rating made by
the younger group's members. And yet, participants of all ages thought
that the average 30-year-old would be happier than the average
70-year-old, and that happiness would decline with age.
Interestingly, the younger people in the study
predicted that they themselves would be about as happy at age 70 as they
were in younger years, though they said that others their own age would
probably get less happy over time. And the older people in the study
tended to think that they'd be happier at older ages than other people
would be.
This tendency to think of oneself as "above
average" has been seen in other studies of everything from driving
ability to intelligence, Lacey says. This bias may combine with negative
attitudes about aging to help explain the study's findings, she notes.
Further analysis of the study data will examine the
impact of individuals' core beliefs on their predictions and memory of
happiness.
Since completing the study, the researchers have
gone back to study people between the ages of 40 and 60, and hope to
present those data soon. They also plan to study how beliefs about
happiness in young and old age influence people's retirement planning
and health care decision making.
More about study:
In addition to Lacey and Ubel, the study was
co-authored by Dylan Smith, Ph.D., a research investigator at the CDBSM.
The center's web site is
www.cbdsm.org. The study was funded by the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, and by the Department of Veterans
Affairs. Reference: Journal of Happiness Studies, June 2006 Vol 7, Issue
2.
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