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perform as he pushes 70. The golfer Tom Watson almost won the 2010 British Open golf
tournament at the age of 59, playing against competitors in their 20s and 30s. And people such as
the financier Warren Buffet, U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, and actress Betty White, each in
their 80s, all enjoy highly productive and energetic lives.
Researchers are beginning to better understand the factors that allow some people to age better
than others. For one, research has found that the people who are best able to adjust well to
changing situations early in life are also able to better adjust later in life (Rubin, 2007; Sroufe,
Collins, Egeland, & Carlson, 2009). [4] Perceptions also matter. People who believe that the
elderly are sick, vulnerable, and grumpy often act according to such beliefs (Nemmers,
2005),[5] and Levy, Slade, Kunkel, and Kasl (2002) [6] found that the elderly who had more
positive perceptions about aging also lived longer.
In one important study concerning the role of expectations on memory, Becca Levy and Ellen
Langer (1994) [7] found that, although young American and Chinese students performed equally
well on cognitive tasks, older Americans performed significantly more poorly on those tasks than
did their Chinese counterparts. Furthermore, this difference was explained by beliefs about
aging—in both cultures, the older adults who believed that memory declined with age also
showed more actual memory declines than did the older adults who believed that memory did
not decline with age. In addition, more older Americans than older Chinese believed that
memory declined with age, and as you can see in Figure 6.13, older Americans performed more
poorly on the memory tasks.
Figure 6.13