Capturing Subjective Age, Subjective Life Expectancy, and Their Links With Older Adults’ Health: The Dutch Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam

Abstract

Objectives: This study compares the associations of two subjective lifetime perspectives, subjective age (SA) and subjective life expectancy (SLE), with physical performance, self-rated health, and depressive symptoms. Methods: 64 91-year-old participants were selected from three waves of the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (2008/09, 2011/12, 2015/16; n = 1822 participants, n = 3500 observations) that included graphical and numerical measures of SA and SLE. We used generalized estimating equations to examine their associations with health. Results: Associations of SA/SLE with health were weaker for physical performance than for self-rated health and depressive symptoms. The associations of SA and SLE with physical performance were of similar magnitude but with self-rated health depended on the type of measure. Depressive symptoms, instead, showed a stronger association with SA than with SLE. Graphical measures showed weaker associations than numerical measures. Discussion: The way in which subjective lifetime perspectives and health are conceptualized and measured influences the strength of their associations.

Trajectories of attitude toward own aging and subjective age from 2008 to 2020 among middle-aged and older adults: Partial evidence of a “COVID-19 effect”.

“…Depressive symptoms are included as a psychological antecedent. Both aspects of physical health and depressive symptoms are linked with ATOA and subjective age in general (Bodner et al, 2017; Deeg et al, 2021; Kotter-Grühn et al, 2009; Miche et al, 2014; Sargent-Cox et al, 2012; Schönstein et al, 2021; Spuling et al, 2020; Stephan et al, 2018a), and individuals with more health-related resources also seem to be better able to psychologically adapt to the pandemic (Peters et al, 2020; Petzold et al, 2020; Röhr et al, 2020; Traunmüller et al, 2020; Wettstein, Vogel et al, 2020).…”

Psychological Obsolescence and Subjective Remaining Life Expectancy are Predictors of Generativity in a Six-Year Longitudinal Study

“…While a shorter SRLE may raise the desire to be generative, this can also coincide with some obstacles in acting out such desire. Especially no longer being in good health may make it more difficult to engage in some forms of generative behavior and was thus found to be related with a shorter SRLE in previous studies (Deeg et al, 2021;Griffin et al, 2013). Severe health conditions might also influence the relationship between SRLE and age.…”

Is Subjective Age Associated with Physical Fitness in Community-Dwelling Older Adults?

“…Subjective age, or felt age (how young or old a person feels relative to chronological age), is another concept that affects aging. Subjective age has attracted growing attention in the last decade since it is shown to be related to a range of health-related outcomes in older people [ 6 ]. A great number of studies have documented that older subjective age is consistently associated with worse mental and cognitive health [ 7 , 8 ], poor sleep quality [ 9 ], lower overall functioning [ 10 , 11 ], and higher morbidity and mortality [ 12 , 13 ].…”