Words can hurt you and your patients
"Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me," according to a children’s taunt that researchers have now turned on its head.
Negative beliefs or stereotypes about aging can cause cardiovascular stress in elderly Americans who encounter such attitudes in their daily lives, wrote a Yale team in an article published in the July Journal of Gerontology.1
Conversely, positive images reduce cardiovascular stress in the elderly, reducing their risk of developing heart disease, congestive heart failure, and a variety of cardiovascular-related diseases, according to findings from a team headed by Becca Levy, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Yale University in New Haven, CT.
Levy and her colleagues recruited 54 people between the ages of 62 and 82 and showed them a math problem, which masked a subliminal sequence of stereotypical words flashed on a computer screen. Participants were exposed to negative stereotypes that included words such as "senile," "dying," and "decrepit." (See box, above right.)
The measures of cardiovascular stress showed an 8-point increase in systolic blood pressure, a 1-point increase in diastolic blood pressure plus increased heart and skin conductance rates in the course of a one-minute challenge.
Another group, subjected to a similar math challenge, was given positive subliminal prompts such as "wise," "sage," and "creative" with dramatically different results. Their systolic and diastolic blood pressures dropped 5 points, while heart rate increased slightly and skin conductance was unchanged.
Interestingly, those subjected to the positive aging stereotypes demonstrated significantly higher self-confidence and higher mathematical performance than those exposed to the negative stereotypes. "Negative stereotypes are found in many aspects of our culture," Levy says, "from casual conversations to television advertisements that often present the elderly either as close to childhood or close to death."
In China, a country with more positive aging stereotypes than the United States, Levy found in a past study that older people performed better on certain memory tasks than their American peers.
"The study suggests that negative stereotypes of aging may contribute to health problems in the elderly without their awareness," Levy says. "This, in turn, could lead to older individuals mistakenly attributing declines in their health to the inevitability of aging, which might then reinforce the negative stereotypes."
Based on her findings, Levy says, future treatment aimed at reducing stress in the elderly should include the reduction of negative aging stereotypes and the promotion of positive ones.
Jared Jobe, PhD, an experimental psychologist and chief of adult psychological development at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, MD, would take Levy’s suggestion a little further. "This is an important finding with strong implications in clinical practice. It shows that the power of words is very physiological. And it gives us all a message to use positive words when we address our patients."
Reference
1. Levy B, Hausdorff J, Hencke R. Reducing cardiovascular stress with positive self-stereotypes of aging. J Gerontol 2000; 386:71-79.
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