Daily Fluctuations in Subjective Age among Older Adults: Links with Stressors, Positive Events, and Emotional Reactions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Subjective age, or felt age, refers to individuals' perception of their age compared to their chronological age. Feeling older than usual has been associated with experiencing more same-day stressors and higher negative affect. Feeling older may indicate depleted psychological resources, increasing the likelihood of interpreting everyday situations as stressful and reacting more intensely to them. Conversely, feeling younger may indicate greater psychosocial resources, enhancing engagement in and responsiveness to positive events. METHODS: This study investigated fluctuations in subjective age as a predictor of same-day event occurrence (stressors and positive events) and affective responses to these events using 14-day diary data from a sample of 108 older Swiss adults (aged 65-92). RESULTS: On average, participants felt approximately 8 years younger than their chronological age, with significant day-to-day variability (ICC = 0.69). On days when individuals felt older than usual, they reported more stressors and fewer positive events. Older subjective age was also associated with greater stress reactivity (greater upticks in negative affect and greater dips in positive affect) and more pronounced responses to positive events. Time-ordered effects showed subjective age predicting positive events, but not stressors. CONCLUSION: These findings underscore the importance of subjective age as a dynamic psychological construct potentially shaping the events people encounter and how they affectively respond to them. In addition, the lagged analyses provide evidence for subjective age as a predictor of daily event processes, but not for daily events as predictors of future subjective age, which contributes to disentangling the direction of association.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".