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Little empirical research has focused on what people say that triggers the salience of age for older adults, let alone for other age groupings. In this study, 570 American respondents (young adult, middle-aged, and older adult) wrote about events that made them “feel my age,” “feel younger,” and “feel older” and also rated the frequency and valence of these events. This generated many thousands of expressed events that coders subsumed under 28 generic categories.
Very different patterns of age salience emerged for the three generations.
Among these, “feeling younger” was rated as less frequent and favorably by young adults, but much more positively by the two samples of older adults. The latter rated “feeling older” less positively than the younger sample, especially the older group who rated it negatively. There was some overlap between events that triggered “feeling my age” and “feeling older,” most of which were associated with physical and cognitive decline for the two older samples. The findings were discussed and future research directions indicated.
