Age differences in goals: Implications for health promotion

Abstract

Objectives: Socioemotional selectivity theory postulates that, as people age, they prioritize emotionally meaningful goals. This study investigated whether these age differences in goals are reflected in how younger (aged 18–36, n = 111) and older adults (aged 62–86, n = 104) evaluated, remembered information from and were persuaded by health messages.

Method: Participants were randomly assigned to read health pamphlets with identical factual information but emphasizing emotional or non-emotional goals.

Results: Findings showed that health messages that emphasized emotional goals, but not those that emphasized future-oriented or neutral goals, were better remembered, were evaluated more positively and led to greater behavioral changes among older adults, but not younger adults.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that health messages targeting older adults may be more effective if they are framed in ways that emphasize love and caring.

Keywords:

• healthy eating
• age differences
• behavioral changes

Notes

Notes

1. A preliminary MANOVA was conducted to test the age × version interaction on the baseline consumption of healthy food, neutral food and fatty food. Results revealed that younger and older participants in different conditions did not differ in their consumption of healthy food, neutral food and fatty food at the beginning of the study.

2. A trait personality measure was included in this study because, although personality differences by age are small in size (McCrae et al., 1999), they can potentially influence reactivity to emotional stimuli (Canli et al., 2001). However, no age difference was found in any of the five personality factors in this study. As a result, in selecting covariates, we did not include personality.

3. In fact, younger participants outperformed older participants in the recall and recognition memory of information from the future-oriented version, t (69) =2.360, p = 0.021 and t (70) = 4.672, p < 0.001 respectively. They also outperformed older participants in recalling information from the neutral version, t (72) =3.051, p = 0.003 (recognition memory only showed a similar but nonsignificant age trend: t (72) = 1.854, p = 0.068). Yet, they did not outperform older participants in either recall or recognition memory of information from the emotionally meaningful version, t (67) = −0.556, n.s and t (67) = −0.643, n.s respectively.

4. To test the specificity of the effects of our pamphlet versions on healthy behaviors, we also included in the study measures of intention and perceived self-efficacy to improve and/or maintain another healthy behavior – exercising. The measure of intention included five items such as ‘how likely is it that you will try to become more active in your lifestyle?’ and the measure of perceived efficacy consisted of 13 items such as ‘how confident are you that you will live a more active lifestyle?’ The pamphlet, which mentioned healthy eating but not exercising, had no effect on either the intention or the perceived efficacy to achieve and/or maintain an active lifestyle. This suggests that the results found in this study are specific to the healthy eating behavior and might indeed be driven by reading the pamphlet.

5. Before statistically controlling for covariates, the univariate analysis for having neutral food revealed a significant age × version interaction, F (2, 209) = 3.263, MSE = 0.51, p = 0.04, η ² = 0.030, but this significant interaction disappeared after controlling for covariates. Both younger (emotional: M = 0.47, SD = 0.76; future-oriented: M = 0.57, SD = 0.70; and neutral: M = 0.20, SD = 0.79) and older (emotional: M = 0.36, SD = 0.73; future-oriented: M = 0.20, SD = 0.69; and neutral: M = 0.43, SD = 0.59) participants did o’t differ in their neutral food consumption (i.e. meat and milky products) over the two-week period.