What's more, participants in the negative-message group performed worse on mathematical tests. And they had more difficulty on a verbal test in which they had to recount a stressful experience in the past five years. Levy speculates that the constant bombardment of negative stereotypes in the culture gets internalized by older people, which lowers their expectations of performance. A grown daughter takes her mother for a medical checkup, and the doctor directs all conversation to the daughter, as though the mother were a child or not even there. As though the couple were two toddlers up past their bedtime.
Greeting cards reinforce the dread of getting older.
It doesn't have to be this way. The Yale study also shows that positive age stereotypes can protect people from stress. Certainly other countries have more respect for older people. The Chinese, for example, have a much more positive attitude toward aging. In a 1994 study by Levy and her colleagues, older participants in China performed much better on memory tests than their American counterparts.