The Impact of Age Stereotypes on Self-perceptions of Aging Across the Adult Lifespan

Abstract

Taken together, although we find some support for contrast effects, most of our results can be interpreted in terms of assimilation effects, suggesting that individuals integrate stereotypical information into their self-evaluations of age(ing) when confronted with stereotypes.

Stereotypes of Aging: Their Effects on the Health of Older Adults

“…In summary, stereotypes of aging are pervasive in our culture and they have been found to influence how older adults see themselves [22,[74][75][76]; how older adults view other older adults (social comparison and beliefs about old age) [8,15,22]; older adults' cognitive and physical performances [16,25,26,28,29,37,55,77]; the ability of older adults to recover from disease [78]; older adults' health behaviors, including their decisions to engage in cognitive, social, and physical activity [1,4,21,65,79] and/or seek medical assistance [33,35,53,80]; as well as how older adults are treated by others and society as a whole [1,3,4,7,[81][82][83].…”

“…To complicate and extend these findings, however, other studies have shown that explicit positive aging stereotypes can have constraining effects on older people's attitudes and health behavior and that negative aging stereotypes can be resisted by older adults resulting in enabling effects such as feelings of personal empowerment and associated health benefits [8,15,22,23].…”

“…For instance, Kotter-Grühn and Hess [22] provided evidence for the negative effects of positive age stereotypes on healthy older adults (such as feeling older and less satisfied with their aging) when confronted with positive and healthy images and descriptions of people their own age. The fact that Hess et al [46] found a small effect size (0.13) in an explicit positively primed condition on a memory task with older adults lends support to this argument.…”

Air quality and health education to increase knowledge and encourage health protective behaviour among older adults in Hamilton, Canada

“…Often there is a discrepancy between how old a person feels and his/her actual age; the age people perceive themselves to be is referred to as a subjective age (Kotter-Gruhn and Hess, 2012). There has been much written about the stigma associated with aging in today's youth-driven society (Schoemann and Branscombe, 2011).…”

Adultos mayores en Chile: descripción de sus necesidades en comunicación en salud preventiva

“…Otros autores defienden el uso de los medios de comunicación en las estrategias que aboguen por los derechos humanos económicos, sociales, culturales y de participación de los adultos mayores, en particular en lo relativo a contrarrestar la imagen cultural estereotipada negativa que predomina de ellos (Casapié, Balbontín, Porras & Mateo, 2011;CNTV, 2005CNTV, , 2010Medina & Zorrilla, 2011;Kotter-Gruhn & Hess, 2012;De Andrés & Maestro, 2013). La estimulación mediante la comunicación de procesos y funciones cognitivas se considera un aspecto relevante de la salud y la calidad de vida del adulto mayor (Martín, Aguado, Díaz & Lorience, 2000;González, García & Mata, 2012), así como la promoción del contacto a través del uso de computadores (Dickinson & Hill, 2007).…”