Daily associations among aging perceptions, perceived health, and perceived stress in older adults

Abstract

Objectives

Daily perceived stress is a key indicator of well-being across adulthood, but particularly for those experiencing age-linked challenges. Understanding how day-level factors most salient to the aging process are associated with daily stress levels can further elucidate the mechanisms involved. Here, we investigate two such age-salient factors—daily perceived health and day-level aging perceptions—on daily perceived stress in later life, with a particular interest in the potential role of aging perceptions as an emotion-focused coping resource.

Method

127 older adults (mean age 79) completed daily surveys reporting aging perceptions, perceived health, and perceived stress for 14 days, along with a global questionnaire. Multilevel models assessed the between-person and within-person influences of both daily aging perceptions and daily perceived health on day-level perceived stress.

Results

Key findings: (a) days of worse perceived health are also days of higher perceived stress; (b) days of more negative aging perceptions are days of higher perceived stress; (c) these individual effects maintain significance when the other is controlled, and (d) these effects interact, so that perceived health is more strongly associated with perceived stress on days when aging perceptions are below a person’s mean.

Conclusion

The moderating effect identifies aging perceptions as a potentially important resource for emotion-focused coping in later life, particularly for older adults experiencing stress associated with poorer perceived health.

Keywords:

• Daily survey
• coping
• daily stress

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Funding

This work was supported by the corresponding author’s institutional research funding.

Data availability statement

Upon completion of the umbrella study and analysis, a de-identified dataset and detailed analytic program can be provided by the corresponding author upon request.