Hence, using a multidimensional approach to VoA, such as AARC in a cross-cultural approach, may come with the potential to better understand what aging means in a specific culture. If cross-cultural research is available, it typically follows a unidimensional VoA approach ( 14, 16). Aging researchers have ascribed an exceptionally strong role to cultural impacts, for instance, arguing that socioemotional aging in relationships, cognition, and even personality may not manifest in the same way across cultures ( 15). For instance, in adults aged 40 years and older, AARC-losses were consistently found to predict subjective age, but also well-being and health, whereas AARC-gains did clearly less so ( 12, 13).Ī second issue that is frequently encountered in research on VoA is that it has, to a considerable degree, relied only on Western samples ( 11, 14). In contrast, examining AARC-gains and AARC-losses has the potential to inform more specifically about what is behind a reported felt age and may lead to necessary differentiations. Looking at previous research on VoA, most older people seem to feel younger than they actually are ( 2, 11). Essentially, AARC aims to address “(…) all those experiences that make a person aware that his or her behavior, level of performance, or ways of experiencing his or her life have changed as a consequence of having grown older (i.e., increased chronological age)” ( 7). Addressing this issue has brought forward the concept of “awareness of age-related change”. Prominent psychological theories on life span development have, for instance, emphasized that the aging process is marked by both perceived gains as well as losses in multiple domains ( 9, 10). These measures may be considered reductionistic in terms of narrowing down the subjective experience of aging to one dimension, yet they have gained considerable attention due to their repeatedly shown associations with key developmental and health outcomes, including depression, physical functioning, and even mortality ( 3– 6).ĭespite the potential for respective studies to stimulate research on VoA, critique on previous research has been raised due to two major issues: for one, by employing simplified unidimensional measures of VoA, the quintessential multidimensionality of how aging can be perceived and reflected upon is not sufficiently depicted ( 7, 8). Research on subjective views on aging (VoA) has to a large degree made use of constructs such as subjective age or the attitudes toward own aging scale. Also, feeling subjectively younger may indeed be more strongly guided by lowered negative aging experiences than by increased positive ones. In conclusion, the findings support key tenets of life span psychology including that age-related gains occur even late in life and that a shift toward more losses occurs with increasing age.
Within the sample from Burkina Faso, differential associations of AARC-gains and AARC-losses to health variables could be shown. In both samples, subjective age was consistently more strongly related to AARC-losses than to AARC-gains. A proportional shift toward more AARC-losses was more clearly observable in the sample from Burkina Faso as compared to the German reference. A cross-sectional method involving a large, representative sample from rural Burkina Faso that included participants aged 40 and older ( N = 3,028) and a smaller convenience sample of German respondents aged 50 years and older ( N = 541) were used to address these questions. The aims of this study were (1) to examine for an assumed proportional shift in the relationship between gains/losses toward more losses as predicted by life span psychology (2) to estimate the association between AARC dimensions and subjective age and (3) to examine the association between health variables and AARC. 5Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, GermanyĬombining recent developments in research on personal views on aging (VoA) and a cross-country comparative approach, this study examined awareness of age-related change (AARC) in samples from rural Burkina Faso and Germany.4Institute of Psychology, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.3Institute for Educational Sciences, Heidelberg University of Education, Heidelberg, Germany.2Department of Psychology, Mannheim University, Mannheim, Germany.1Network Aging Research, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.Anton Schönstein 1,2 *, Anna Schlomann 1,3, Hans-Werner Wahl 1,4 † and Till Bärnighausen 5 †
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