Attitudes to aging mediate the reciprocal effects of health anxiety and physical functioning

Abstract

Objective

To understand if attitudes to aging mediate the reciprocal effects of health anxiety and physical functioning among older adults with medical conditions. We examined: (1) if these effects are reciprocal; (2) if attitudes to aging (psychological loss, psychological growth, physical change) play a mediating role in these effects.

Design

A sample of 226 community-dwelling older adults (T1 age range = 65-94, mean age = 73.59, SD = 6.29) reporting at least one chronic medical condition completed two phone interviews across six months.

Main outcome measures

Background measures, health anxiety, physical functioning, and attitudes to aging at T1 and T2.

Results

T2 attitudes to aging served as a mediator controlling for T1 attitudes. There was a direct effect of worse physical functioning at T1 on increased health anxieties at T2. Negative (but not positive) attitudes to aging mediated that effect. The reversed temporal sequencing (T1 health anxiety leading to T2 physical functioning) was significant only when mediated by negative attitudes to aging.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that viewing aging as mostly a time of losses (but not as a time of gains) serves as an important mechanism through which health anxieties and physical functioning affect each other among older adults having chronic medical conditions.

Keywords:

• Attitudes to aging
• chronic medical conditions
• health anxiety
• older adults
• physical functioning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, E.B., upon reasonable request.

Note

Notes

1 The reason for the use of Russian language is because around 15% of the Israeli-Jewish population include immigrants from the USSR who arrived to Israel during the 1990s. Their mother-tongue is Russian and some of them, especially older adults, do not have the required level of language proficiency in order to be interviewed in Hebrew (Remennick, 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by Ministry of Science, Technology and Space.