An international study finds that older adults who have strong beliefs about how other seniors should behave also report having more memory problems themselves. The study suggests a relationship between “ageist attitudes” and memory.

“Ageist attitudes, in this context, refers to how people think older adults should behave – the restrictions or prescriptive ideas that someone places on what older adults should and should not do,” says Shevaun Neupert, corresponding author of the study and a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. “We wanted to know if there is any relationship between these attitudes and memory.”

To explore this issue, the researchers recruited 974 study participants between the ages of 50-94. Participants were based in nine countries: the U.S., Canada, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, India, China, Israel, and Türkiye. Study participants were asked to complete a survey every day for 14 days. The survey questions were designed to measure the study participant’s ageist attitudes each day as well as the number of memory failures they experienced that day.

One clear finding was that people reported more memory failures on days that they also endorsed more prescriptive restrictions for older adults.

“In other words, on days when someone had more pronounced ageist attitudes, they also had more memory problems,” Neupert says.

“For example, one person might have very strong ageist attitudes on a Monday, but weak ageist attitudes on a Friday, and that person likely also reported significantly more memory failures on Monday than on Friday.

“To be clear, the correlation we found was not between an individual’s memory failures and how that individual feels they should behave; it was a correlation between an individual’s memory failures and how that individual feels other older adults should behave,” Neupert says.

Another interesting aspect of the findings is that the results were consistent across all nine countries.

“The results were not really influenced by where the study participants were,” Neupert says. “People who had more ageist attitudes had more pronounced memory failures, regardless of whether they were in China, Ukraine, or the U.S. That’s significant because aging, ageism and memory loss are all important issues around the world.

“More research can help us understand what might be behind the correlation we’ve identified here, but our study suggests that tackling ageism on a broad, social level could have meaningful benefits for older adults everywhere,” Neupert says.

The paper, “Daily Ageism, Subjective Age, and Memory Failures: A Multi-Country Integrated Data Analysis,” is published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development. Co-authors of the paper include Shalini Mukherjee and Reyyan Can, Ph.D. students at NC State; Minxia Luo and Christina Roecke of the University of Zurich; Anna Kornadt of the University of Luxembourg; Yuval Palgi of the University of Haifa; Amit Shrira of Bar-Ilan University; Klaus Rothermund and Maria Wirth of Friedrich-Schiller University Jena; Oksana Senyk of WSB Merito University in Gdańsk and Ukrainian Catholic University; Kvitoslava Khorob of Ukrainian Catholic University; Christiane Hoppmann and Juhyeong Lee of the University of British Columbia; Yoonseok Choi of Simon Fraser University; Jana Nikitin of the University of Vienna; and Tianyuan Li of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

This work was done with support from a variety of sources, including a Suniti-Anand Gupta Award and awards from the German Research Foundation, the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation.