As we get older, the likelihood of losing loved ones or experiencing declines in health increases. Does the experience of such losses result in decreases in well-being in older adulthood? Researchers have found that well-being differs across the life span and that the patterns of these differences depend on how well-being is measured.
Measures of global subjective well-being assess individuals’ overall perceptions of their lives. This can include questions about life satisfaction or judgments of whether individuals are currently living the best life possible. What factors may contribute to how people respond to these questions? Age, health, personality, social support, and life experiences have been shown to influence judgments of global well-being. It is important to note that predictors of well-being may change as we age. What is important to life satisfaction in young adulthood can be different in later adulthood. Early research on well-being argued that life events such as marriage or divorce can temporarily influence well-being, but people quickly adapt and return to their average baseline (called the hedonic treadmill; Diener, Lucas, & Scollon, 2006). The hedonic treadmill theory proposes that people eventually return to their own base range of happiness (higher or lower as the case may be for each person), regardless of what happens to them. More recent research suggests otherwise. Using longitudinal data, researchers have examined well-being prior to, during, and after major life events such as widowhood, marriage, and unemployment (Lucas, 2007). Different life events influence well-being in different ways, and individuals do not often adapt back to baseline levels of well-being. The influence of events, such as unemployment, may have a lasting negative influence on well-being as people age. Research suggests that self-reported well-being is actually highest in early adulthood and late adulthood and lowest in middle adulthood when there is a temporary U-shaped dip (which does not necessarily equate with the myth of the midlife crisis as you may recall). Other research finds that older adults report more positive and less negative affect than middle age and younger adults (Magai, 2008; Mroczek, 2001). It should be noted that both self-reported well-being and positive affect tend to taper off during late older adulthood and these declines may be accounted for by increases in health-related losses during these years (Charles & Carstensen, 2010).
The Six-factor Model of Psychological Well-being
Psychological well-being aims to evaluate the positive aspects of psychosocial development, as opposed to factors of ill-being, such as depression or anxiety. The Six-factor Model of Psychological Well-being is a theory developed by Carol Ryff, which determines six factors that contribute to an individual's psychological well-being, contentment, and happiness. Ryff’s Model proposes the following six core dimensions of positive well-being:
- Self-acceptance
- Personal growth
- Purpose in life
- Environmental mastery
- Autonomy
- Positive relations with others
Ryff’s model differs from other models in that it recognizes that well-being, like people, is multidimensional, and not merely about happiness, or "positive" emotions. A life well-lived is thought to be balanced, engaging each of the different aspects of well-being, instead of being too narrowly focused. Ryff roots her model from Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, where the goal of life isn’t "feeling good" necessarily, but is, instead, about living optimally.
Research on this model has shown that older adults report higher levels of environmental mastery (feelings of competence and control in managing everyday life) and autonomy (independence), lower personal growth and purpose in life, and similar levels of positive relations with others as younger individuals. Links between health and interpersonal flourishing, or having high-quality connections with others, may be more important than previously thought in understanding how to optimize quality of life in old age.
The Impact of Ageism
Studying bias against old people is a relatively new phenomenon, partly because old people are a relatively new phenomenon. For hundreds of millennia, the average human lifespan rarely reached 40. There have always been some people who lived well beyond that age. Socrates, born in 470 B.C., died at 70 (of execution by poisoning, not age). Harriet Tubman, born in 1822, died at 91. But 20th century health care advancements and other factors caused life expectancy to skyrocket. An American born in 1900 lived, on average, just over 47 years. By 1960, that number had jumped to almost 70. Today, we can expect to live to about 80 (but we could like much longer).
Meanwhile, old people have become more segregated. Throughout most of human history, different generations usually lived together or nearby. But the Industrial Revolution lured younger people into cities for jobs, and urban living quarters couldn’t accommodate extended families, said psychologist Todd D. Nelson, of California State University Nelson, Stanislaus. Grandparents and great-grandparents were transformed from familiar household members into relatives who lived separately and often distantly. Nelson mentioned an even less obvious reason for the changing status of old people: the invention of the printing press. Before then, old people were respected sources of valuable knowledge handed down from earlier generations and accumulated through their years of experience. Books made knowledge readily obtainable from strangers.
This transition 500 years ago seems echoed in today’s supposed gap between “digital native” millennials and older people who, according to conventional wisdom, are technologically inept. Still another theory holds that ageism reflects our deep fears about dying. Death, once a normal household event, now usually occurs in nursing homes and hospitals — unfamiliar and unsettling places.
“Reminders of our mortality make us very anxious,” Nelson said. Casual ageism, on the other hand, isn’t even especially frowned upon. It’s so common it may seem routine, trivial, well-intentioned. But it’s not necessarily harmless. Researchers have found numerous links between cultural ageism and health problems — physical, cognitive and emotional — among older people.
Challenging ageism means getting people to pay closer attention to messages they’ve been hearing all their lives. These messages are found in jokes and insults and compliments and offhand remarks. They’re in the TV programs and commercials we watch (one study found that people who watched more TV held more anti-age biases). They’re posted on Facebook, which officially bans hate speech based on categories including race, nationality, religion and gender — but not age. They’re in the advertising claims that have built a $200 billion “anti-aging” industry of skin creams, Botox injections, hair coloring, hair restoration and cosmetic surgery.
From childhood on, Americans receive messages that old age means “you’re unhealthy, your mind is shot, you’re boring, you’re depressed and sad and lonely,” said Sally Brown of St. Paul, who teaches a course called “Aging With Gusto” through the St. Paul-based Vital Aging Network.
Negative Images
True, some older people are unhealthy or lonely — as are some young people. But similar characteristics are interpreted differently by age. A physically fit young person is healthy; a fit old person seems “younger.” A teenager losing the car keys is momentarily careless, an older person is developing dementia. Statements that denigrate older people’s functioning, thinking and appearance, advocates say, can lead to old people being stigmatized, isolated, ignored, politically disadvantaged and treated as “others.” Yet despite — or because of — the ubiquity of these messages, people rarely consider that they might be damaging. Compared with other common prejudices, ageism is rarely discussed.
“Ageism is a thing, just like racism and sexism, and it’s been under the radar for, well, forever,” said Todd D. Nelson, a psychologist at California State University, Stanislaus. While researching the psychology of prejudice in general, Nelson noticed the scarcity of information about ageism. So he published a book, Ageism: Stereo-typing and Prejudice Against Older Persons. “In my writing, I ask the very simple question: Why are we hiding that we’re getting older?” Nelson said. “It implies we’re ashamed of getting older, that it’s bad to get older. It’s so deeply embedded in our culture.”
Biases take different forms with different targets, so comparisons aren’t always valid, but sometimes swapping groups in a statement can highlight offensiveness. A birthday card that says “‘Ha ha ha, too bad you’re [insert ethnicity, religion, etc.],’” Nelson said, “wouldn’t go over so well.”
‘Everyone Is Ageist’
Ageism is a weird prejudice in several respects. For one, it has an ironic aspect: It’s a bias held by younger people against a group to which they will eventually belong — if they’re lucky. Nelson has called it “prejudice against our feared future selves.”
“Everyone is ageist because we are all biased,” said Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and a blog of the same name. Everyday ageism is so widespread that people tend to use “young” and “old” as almost synonymous with positive versus negative traits. “Someone will say, ‘My mom is 94 but she’s not old,’” Applewhite said. Wrong. “She may be peppy, she maybe having wild sex every night, she may be a lingerie model, she may be a marathon runner. But she is old.”
Figure 10.6.3 (Unsplash license; Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz via Unsplash)
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
People who accept negative age stereotypes are likelier to suffer cardiovascular problems and symptoms of Alzheimer’s, according to extensive research by Becca Levy, a professor of public health and psychology at Yale University. Meanwhile, Levy found that people with more positive images of aging had better psychiatric healthand physical functioning. Her subjects were studied over periods of years, minimizing the possibility that worsening health conditions shaped their outlook rather than the other way around. In one study, people over 60 with negative images of aging were more than 30 percent more likely to show memory decline. In another, people with positive images of aging lived longer by an average of 7.5 years.
Levy theorizes that young people are especially likely to absorb ageist stereotypes because they don’t identify with older people and feel no need to defend against the insults. Later, when they become old, they turn those attitudes back on themselves, experiencing health problems they’ve grown up expecting old people to experience.
Even health-care professionals may treat older patients differently than they do younger ones.
We’re All OK
Fighting ageism might begin with examining one’s own preconceptions and looking for ways to substitute upbeat thoughts for downers. Start thinking of old age as “a time of growth, learning, exploration, adventure,” Nelson suggested. Sally Brown agrees that people must change their mind-sets. “Embrace age as a natural process that begins at birth and continues throughout life,” she said. Remember that everybody gets older every day, and those who get to be old are the lucky ones.
Consider your own responses to ageist language or behavior — do you laugh politely at an ageist joke or point out that it’s problematic? Brown endorses challenging ageism when you encounter it. At the very least, don’t be complicit — don’t repeat the joke!
Even beauty magazines, traditionally purveyors of ageist attitudes, may be gaining awareness. Allure magazine announced on its September cover, with Helen Mirren, that it would stop using the term “anti-aging” and called on the industry to follow suit. “Growing older is a wonderful thing because it means that we get a chance, every day, to live a full, happy life,” the inside article said.
But lifelong lessons can be hard to escape. Even Brown admits she struggles not to feel flattered if someone tells her she looks younger than she is. “It’s really not a compliment,” she said. “It’s saying that who I really am is not OK. To make me be OK you have to tell me I’m younger than I am. Actually, people of every age are OK."
Traditionally, research on aging described only the lives of people over age 65 and the very old. Contemporary theories and research recognizes that biogenetic and psychological processes of aging are complex and lifelong. Functioning in each period of life is influenced by what happened earlier and, in turn, affects subsequent change. We all age in specific social and historical contexts. Perhaps we can re-imagine what aging can mean as we evolve attitudes and stereotypes.
