Subjective Age is Becoming Younger
Given a continued slow upward trend in life expectancy, accompanied by improved health at a given age, it makes some sense for impressions of subjective age to also exhibit change over time. Older people compare their present experience with that shown in literature and film of past generations, and memories of their parents and grandparents. Ask someone how old they feel in an era in which aging is steadily, modestly slowed over time, and they will feel younger than their age, as their points of comparison aged more rapidly than is now the case.
Subjective age describes how old people feel, in comparison with how old they actually are chronologically. It is usually assessed with a single-item question (such as "How old do you feel?"). Evidence from nearly 300 studies using this item has shown that most middle-age and older people feel younger than they are, including very old individuals. This phenomenon has been labeled subjective age bias and might reflect an age-group dissociation process ("They are old, but I feel younger") that helps individuals cope with ageism.
Little is known about historical shifts in subjective age. Moving beyond the very few time-lagged cross-sectional cohort comparisons, we examined historical shifts in within-person trajectories of subjective age from midlife to advanced old age. We used cohort-comparative longitudinal data from middle-age and older adults in the German Ageing Survey (N = 14,928; ~50% female) who lived in Germany and were between 40 and 85 years old when entering the study. They provided up to seven observations over 24 years.
Results revealed that being born later in historical time is associated with feeling younger by 2% every birth-year decade and with less intraindividual change toward an older subjective age. Women reported feeling younger than men; this gender gap widened across cohorts. The association of higher education with younger subjective age became weaker across cohorts. This historical trend of feeling younger was observable across all ages in the second half of life, also - contrary to our expectations - in very old age.