Our earlier post on psychology licensing prep for the elderly urged those of us who are elderly to begin to think positively about our age, to treat our age as an asset rather than a liability.

I thought of this again when I came across an article that Judith Graham wrote in the New York Times last year. “All of us have beliefs — many of them subconscious, dating back to childhood — about what it means to get older”, Graham observed. She continued:

Psychologists call these “age stereotypes.” And, it turns out, they can have an important effect on seniors’ health.

When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows.

When stereotypes are positive — when older adults view age as a time of wisdom, self-realization and satisfaction — results point in the other direction, toward a higher level of functioning. The latest report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that seniors with this positive bias are 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability.

For people who care about and interact with older people, the message is clear: your attitude counts because it can activate or potentially modify these deeply held age stereotypes.

The perpetuation of stereotypes happens because of the way cultural assumptions work on the malleability of human the brain. Research shows that environmental factors, including the implicit and subtle assumptions of the society where we were brought up, wire our brains in profound and significant ways. Our brains are ‘primed’ to accept certain things as normal which seem strange to other culture groups.

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