Presents a study which suggests that such negative portrayals of
aging may actually help bring about the memory problems of aging.
Methodology of the study; Result of the study; Words with negative and
positive connotations about aging; Views on negative stereotypes.
By
Jessica Rothchild, published on May 01, 1997
At one time or another nearly everyone over the age of 30 has
recieved abirthday card joking about declining memory or other common
ailments of old age. Now a study suggest that such negative portrayals of
aging may actually help bring about the memory problems they
lampoon.
In one part of the study Harvard University researcher Bacca Levy,
Ph.D., asked volunteers aged 60 or over to press either the up or down
arrow on a keyboard each time a word was flashed on a computer monitor.
Some participants were shown words with negative connotations about
aging, such as senile and incompetent, while other folks saw terms with
more positive associations, such as wise or alert
Each word was visible for such a brief period of time--anywhere
from a tenth to a twentieth of a second--that the participants couldn't
actually read them. Even so, subjects shown words that reinforced
negative views of the erderly later performed more poorly on memory tests
than folks who saw the positive words, Levy reports in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. So negative stereotypes may become
something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if we're not
conscious that we've been exposed to them. "This shows how insidious our
views of aging are," Levy says. Maybe it's no coincidence that in an
earlier cross-cultural study Levy found that views of aging are
particularly positive in China--where elders far outperform their
American counterparts on memory tests.
