What can be done about negative stereotypes that portray older adults as out of touch, useless, feeble, incompetent, pitiful and irrelevant?
Should anything be done?
These questions arose at a recent meeting of the National Academies of Sciences' Forum on Aging, Disability and Independence, where the answer to the second one was, yes.
With late-night TV comedy shows where supposedly clueless older people are the butt of jokes and with ads for anti-aging creams equating youth with beauty and wrinkles with decay, harsh and unflattering images shape assumptions about aging, speakers said. Although aging Americans may hope for good health and happiness, they tend to believe that growing older involves deterioration and decline, according to reports from the Reframing Aging Initiative.
A partnership of eight national organizations, Reframing Aging is a campaign to improve public understanding of older adults' needs and contributions to society, according to the website frameworksinstitute.org. The groups are AARP, the American Federation for Aging Research, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Society on Aging, the Gerontological Society of America, Grantmakers in Aging, the National Council on Aging and the National Hispanic Council on Aging. (On Twitter at #ReFramingAging.)
They suggest that dismal expectations become self-fulfilling as people start experiencing changes associated with growing older -- aching knees or problems with hearing, for instance. If a person has internalized negative stereotypes, confidence erodes, stress responses activate, motivation diminishes ("I'm old, and it's too late to change things") and sense of efficacy ("I can do that") falls away.
Health can suffer as a result, according to studies showing that older adults who hold negative stereotypes tend to walk slowly, experience memory problems and recover less fully from a fall or fracture, among other ramifications.
By contrast, senior citizens whose view of aging is primarily positive live 7.5 years longer than other senior citizens.
Can positive images of aging be enhanced and the effects of negative stereotypes reduced? At the National Academies of Sciences forum, experts embraced such steps and offered suggestions for how they can be advanced:
• Become aware of implicit biases. These are automatic, unexamined thoughts. An example: The sight of an older person using a cane could trigger associations with dependency and incompetence.
Forum attendee Charlotte Yeh, chief medical officer for AARP Services, spoke of her experience after being struck by a car and undergoing a lengthy, painful rehabilitation. Limping and using a cane, she routinely found strangers treating her as if she were helpless.
"I would come home feeling terrible about myself," she said. Decorating her cane with ribbons and flowers turned things around. "People were, like, 'Oh, my God, that's so cool,'" said Yeh, who noted that the decorations evoked the positivity associated with creativity instead of the negativity associated with disability.
Implicit biases can be difficult to discover because they coexist with thoughts that seem to clash with them. For example, someone could implicitly feel that "being old is terrible," while explicitly that person thinks, "We need to do more, as a society, to value older people." Yet this kind of internal conflict can go unrecognized.
To identify implicit bias, researchers suggest, pay attention to your automatic responses. If you find yourself flinching at the sight of wrinkles when you look in the bathroom mirror, for instance, acknowledge this reaction and then ask yourself, "Why is this upsetting?"
Use strategies to challenge biases. Patricia Devine, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies ways to reduce racial prejudice, calls this "tuning in" to habits of mind that usually go unexamined.
Resolving to change these habits isn't enough, she said at the National Academies of Sciences forum: "You need strategies." Her research shows that these strategies are effective:
• Replace stereotypes. This entails becoming aware of and then altering responses informed by stereotypes. Instead of assuming a senior citizen with a cane needs your help, for instance, you might ask, "Would you like assistance?" -- a question that respects an individual's autonomy.
• Embrace new images. This involves thinking about people who don't fit the stereotype you've acknowledged. This could be a group of people (older athletes), a famous person (TV producer Norman Lear, now 95, who just sold a show on aging to NBC) or someone you know (a cherished older friend).
• Individualize it. The more we know about people, the less we're likely to think of them as a group characterized by stereotypes. Delve into specifics. What unique challenges does an older person face? How does that person cope day-to-day?
• Switch perspectives. This involves imagining yourself as a member of the group you've been stereotyping. What would it be like if strangers patronized you and called you "sweetie" or "dear," for example?
• Make contact. Instead of merely having opinions about older people, interact with some. Visit and talk with that friend who's moved into a retirement community. Chat with a gray-haired checker at the store.
BETTER THINKING
Another strategy -- strengthening implicit positive stereotypes -- comes from Becca Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University and a leading researcher in this field.
In a 2016 study, she and several colleagues demonstrated that exposing older adults to subliminal positive messages about aging several times over a month improved their mobility and balance -- crucial measures of physical function.
The messages were embedded in word blocks that flashed quickly across a computer screen, including descriptors such as "wise," "creative," "spry" and "fit." The weekly sessions were about 15 minutes long, proving that even a relatively short exposure to positive images of aging can make a difference.
At the National Academies of Sciences forum, Levy noted that 196 countries have committed to support the World Health Organization's fledgling campaign to end discrimination against people because they are old. Bolstering positive images of aging and countering the effect of negative stereotypes need to be central parts of that endeavor, she said.
It's also something older adults can do, individually, by choosing to focus on what's going well in their lives rather than on what's going wrong.
• Claim a seat at the table. "Nothing about us without us" is a clarion call of disability activists, who have demanded that their right to participate in society be recognized and made possible by adequate accommodations such as wheelchair ramps. So far, however, senior citizens haven't similarly insisted on inclusion, making it easier to overlook the ways in which they're marginalized.
Where are the letter-writing campaigns for larger type on electronics packaging and bicycle pumps?
At the forum, Kathy Greenlee, vice president of aging and health policy at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo., and a former assistant secretary for aging in the Department of Health and Human Services, called for a new wave of advocacy by and for senior citizens, saying, "We need more older people talking publicly about themselves and their lives."
"Everybody is battling aging by themselves, reinforcing the notion that how someone ages is that individual's responsibility" rather than a collective responsibility, she said.
This article is produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service and program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
ActiveStyle on 12/04/2017