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 "Previous research has generally found the same thing, a more
positive attitude is beneficial," said coauthor Jennifer Bellingtier,
of North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
"People with positive attitudes are less likely to be hospitalized
and tend to live longer," she told Reuters Health.
The researchers had 43 adults, ages 60 to 96, answer questions about
their experience with aging in general, like feeling more or less
useful now than when they were younger, or more or less happy.
Then, on a daily basis for eight days, participants completed
questionnaires that asked about stressful events and negative
emotions like fear, irritability or distress.
As reported in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, people with
more positive attitudes about aging generally tended to report
consistent emotional states across the eight-day period, regardless
of stressors.
But among those with more negative attitudes, emotions fluctuated
depending on their stressors.
For older adults, stress often centers on relations with family or
friends, while for younger people it may more often be related to
work, Bellingtier said.
Almost all cardiovascular functions tend to be worse in people with
more negative reactions to stress, she said.
“The media presents a distorted view of aging, making jokes about
mental and physical incompetence,” Bellingtier said. “The more
you’re exposed to it the more you’re picking up those stereotypes.”
In fact, she said, older adults are often happier with their lives
than people in their 20s or 30s, given their real world life
experience and time to develop meaningful relationships.
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She and her coauthors tried to account for personality in general as
well, since people who are generally positive may have more positive
attitudes about aging.
Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven,
Connecticut, has also studied this question, although she wasn't
part of this new study. She told Reuters Health by email that
negative age stereotypes can exacerbate older individuals’ stress
experience, while positive age stereotypes can buffer their
experience of stress.
“In a recent intervention study with older individuals, we found
that it is possible to bolster positive age stereotypes and reduce
negative age stereotypes,” Levy said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2ayuhTw The Journals of Gerontology: Series B,
online August 3, 2016.
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