Insecurity about getting old: age-contingent self-worth, attentional bias, and well-being

Abstract

Objectives: Older adulthood has often been recognized as a time of increased well-being and positive cognitive biases. However, older adults can also experience many social and identity challenges. We sought to investigate which older adults might be most vulnerable to these difficulties. We propose that to the extent an older adult has age-related contingent self-esteem they will be at risk for lower well-being and negative attentional biases.

Methods: Across three studies, we measured older adults’ self-reported aging self-worth contingencies, as well as various measures of well-being including subjective stress. We then had participants complete a cued-dot probe task, where each trial either began with an aging threat or not.

Results: In an initial pilot study, we found that older adults reporting specific cognitive decline contingencies held an attentional bias toward rejection, primarily when cued with the word senile. In Study 1, we found general aging contingencies to be associated with lower well-being and a rejection bias when cued with old. In Study 2, we found that a stronger rejection bias, particularly when cued with old, was associated with greater stress.

Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that older adults who are insecure about aging may have lower well-being and negatively biased social cognitive patterns. Negatively biased attentional patterns may play a key role in maintaining feelings of insecurity. Importantly, our research sheds light on those older adults who may not experience a positivity effect.

Keywords:

• Attentional bias
• older adults
• rejection
• self-worth contingency
• well-being

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Further information regarding participant demographics and recruitment are available from the authors upon request.

2 Consistent with the broader dot probe literature, there were no significant findings with the acceptance biases, suggesting that our findings are not due to an attentional orientation toward all emotional expressions.

3 In this study, we also set out to recruit younger participants under the age of 60 to ensure that our findings were specific to older adults (N = 241; M_age=29.33, SD = 10.30). Importantly, we did not find a similar pattern of results for the younger adults. Further information is available upon request from the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture under Team Grant FRQSC SE-#210323.