Worrying About Aging Can Make You Old

May 1, 2009 — -- Know someone who's about to turn 50? The mail will soon bring greetings that can strike terror in many a heart: An invitation to join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). That dreaded condition known as the normal aging process has arrived.

If your friend, or you if you're a baby boomer, dwells too long on that fact, it could make those gray hairs even more tragic.

A new study shows that fearing the loss of memory, one of those so-called "normal" symptoms of aging, can actually make a person more forgetful. Especially if he or she is highly educated.

Worrying about aging and memory loss, according to psychology professor Tom Hess of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, can become a "self-fulfilling prophesy." He suspects those concerns begin earlier for many, partly because of that subtle invitation to join the growing ranks of seniors.

"If you worry about this [loss of memory and other cognitive functions], it might become part of your psyche and have this pervasive effect, regardless of what's happening," Hess said in an interview.

He is the lead author of a study in Experimental Aging Research, co-authored by Joey Hinson and Elizabeth Hodges, also of North Carolina State.

It's not a large study and the findings cannot be considered conclusive. But they are consistent with earlier work by Hess and others showing that seniors are particularly concerned and, thus, more likely to show anxiety when confronted with questions about memory loss.

The researchers conducted several experiments with 103 seniors in two groups, ages 60 to 70 and 71 to 82, to see how certain cues would affect their ability to perform tasks in math and memorization.

Some participants, for example, were told they were going to take a test that would explain why younger and older adults perform so differently on memory tests. They were also told to write down their age just before taking the test. Those are considered "threats" in psychological research.

Other participants, however, were told that the test was "free of age-related biases" and adults of various ages should perform similarly on the test, considered a "non threat" status.

As expected, the "threatened" participants performed much more poorly on a memorization test than the non-threatened participants, especially in the 60-70 group. Participants in the older group were less affected by the threat, possibly because they already knew they were old and have adjusted to that fact.