The rose-colored glasses some people don just keep getting
rosier as the years pass.
At least that’s what a recent study by the University of
California, Santa Cruz, suggests, emphasizing that older adults
tend to reflect on their lives more positively than their younger
counterparts.
The rose-colored glasses some people don just keep getting rosier as the years pass.
At least that’s what a recent study by the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests, emphasizing that older adults tend to reflect on their lives more positively than their younger counterparts.
When adults look back on important decisions they’ve made in their lives, they tend to downplay the negative aspects of those decisions and accentuate the positive, said three researchers at the university who conducted four separate experiments in 2002-03.
The study also looked at how people make decisions and what they do to fill in the gaps when they don’t have complete information. Often, the missing information is false but is perceived as necessary to make the decision, the study said.
“What we wanted to look at is how younger and older adults make decisions and the processes they use,” said UCSC graduate student Marisa Knight, who aided in the study along with then-undergraduate Michael McCaffrey. Associate professor of psychology Mara Mather led the research.
“What we found is that yes, some of those processes can improve the decision-making process, but it also can create false memories. We tend to have those false memories because we want to put things in correspondence, or align them with the circumstances,” Knight said.
The first study looked at how adults make decisions when two options cannot be compared directly. In one experiment, participants were asked to play the role of prospective tenants looking for an apartment.
The tenants compared two apartments based on factors such as monthly rent, square footage and natural light.
Participants knew the first apartment had hardwood floors but didn’t know anything about the flooring in the second apartment.
When asked to make a decision about which apartment to rent, the majority of the participants inferred the second apartment had carpet in an effort to make the two options more directly comparable.
Another part of the experiment dealt with deciphering language between healthcare plans, a circumstance more relevant to older adults and potentially more detrimental if the blanks are filled in with incorrect information.
“The particular choices (in the experiments) were pretty compelling, and they were choices that are faced in real life and will have meaning in life,” Knight said. “It was interesting, because we found that a lot of individual and personality factors also play into which strategies people use to make decisions.”
Individual idiosyncrasies probably play the most formative role in how people remember their pasts, said David Reikowski, program director at Solutions, an outpatient psychiatry program affiliated with Hollister’s Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital.
“In my experiences, I’ve seen a mixed bag,” he said. “Some individuals I’ve seen reflect back on their lives and include both positive and negative experiences.
Others maybe are not wanting to dwell on the sad events and want to push away that awareness that’s rooted so strongly in their past.
But I can certainly understand the psychology of a person who is reflecting on their life and trying to focus on the positive more than the negative.”
The study also looked at older adults – ages 65 to 80 – and concluded they generally tend to make decisions based more on emotional meaning than practical application.
Additionally, when making decisions, they tended to compare the features of both options one at a time.
In the apartment example, for instance, older participants generally looked at monthly rent of the first apartment, then compared it to that of the second apartment.
By contrast, the study showed younger people tended to look at one option in its entirety before moving onto the next option.
So, they tended to inspect the monthly rent, size and all other characteristics of the first apartment before examining the second apartment, then make their decision.
Part of the reason may be because younger adults are at a stage in their lives when they are making critical decisions – such as career moves and deciding on marriage partners – and are more focused on acquiring as much information as possible so as not to be misled, Knight said.
Older people, on the other hand, are more concerned with being content with their lives and feeling like they can look back without regret.
“On one hand, (older adults are) trying to maintain their well being,” Knight said. “On the other hand, it might be a negative thing. They might be less likely to learn from past experiences.”