Feeling Younger: An Effective Way Of Promoting Successful Aging

Actual age, as a widely used demographic variable in the psychology study, refers to the individual’s living age or the number of years between now and the birth year.However, using actual age to study old adults has many limitations. Because the actual age will cover the complexity and diversity of the elderly, leading to the misunderstanding to older age groups. In fact, people always think they belong to which age, rather than their actual age. This subjective age was older individuals’ self-perception and evaluation for how old they are, and it can help us know the elderly more easily. Although many researchers have studied the feature of subjective age and its influencing factors, but these researches were mainly done by Western researchers.China has no system studies on subjective age system so far. Therefore, this study attempts to examine the feature and influencing factors of subjective age for Chinese elderly, as well as the relationship between subjective and successful aging through the following four sub- research.The first study use questionnaires to investigate whether Chinese elderly’s subjective exists younger bias and to what extent about this bias. That is to say, Chinese elderly’s subjective age is more or less than their actual age and how much the deviation is. Then the present study aims to explore the main factors affecting the elderly’s subjective age. The results showed that in general the Chinese elderly maintain a younger subjective age, and they are younger 4-13 years on average than their actual age.The second study adopted the paradigms of experimental research to explore the relationship between subjective age and physical function with the grip size as a measure of physical function. On the basis of existing research, the present study expands the sample size and divides randomly the subjects into three groups to receive three different experimental manipulations: your grip performance is better than 80% of your peers, your grip performance is near to your peers, no any feedback. This groupingcan separate the results of social compare from the effects of subjective age, more accurately examining the causal relationship between subjective age and the change of grip. In addition, this study also recorded the duration time subjects grasped the grip dynamometer in order to examine whether the changes between the first and the second grip size are due to the subjects’ subjective effort. The results showed that, when the elderly were induced to produce a younger subjective age, their grip strength increased significantly.The third study intends to extend previous studies, using memory ability as a measure of cognitive function,and to explore whether subjective age- feeling older or younger- is closely related with cognitive function. Similar to the second study, the present study aims to examine whether the change of subjective cause the change of memory ability through the paradigms of experimental research. The results showed that, when the elderly were induced to produce a younger subjective age, their memory capacity improved significantly.The fourth study aims to systematically analyze the relationship between younger subjective and mental health for Chinese elderly in order to validate whether this self-regulation is appropriate for the elderly in China, eventually expecting to help old adults form and maintain more positive subjective age bias, and further improving the mental health of the elderly. The present study this study, elderly depression as a mental health measure, by hierarchical regression statistical methods, examining the impact of age on the subjective elderly mental health. The results showed that, after controlling for the demographic variables affecting old adults’ depression emotion, subjective age bias negatively predicted depression emotion, that is to say, the younger old adults’ subjective age was, the less depression mood they reported.Overall, this study systematically examined the characteristics and influencing factors of subjective age for the elderly and revealed that subjective age was an important indicator of successful aging by experiment study, providing a new perspective and frame of reference for the future research with on the elderly population...