Being slower, feeling older? Experimentally induced cognitive aging experiences have limited impact on subjective age

Initial experimental research has shown that subjective age may change in response to induced aging experiences, but replication and extension are needed. The present study investigates if age-related cognitive gain or loss experiences evoke decreases/increases in subjective age. A multidimensional subjective age measure was used to explore domain-specific internalization effects. 78 individuals aged 59-70 years were randomly assigned to two experimental conditions and a control group. Participants took a cognitive attention test and received gain-oriented feedback on their accuracy or loss-oriented feedback on their processing speed. A mixed factors analysis of covariance was used to examine changes in feel age, look age, do age, and interest age. After being primed with age-related losses, participants reported older do ages as compared to before the experimental priming. Priming age-related gains had only a marginally significant effect on do age. All other subjective age dimensions remained unaffected by the experimental priming. Although previous research has shown that subjective age can be manipulated experimentally, findings from the present study underscore that a comprehensive and cross-domain improvement of subjective age may require personally relevant and repeated experiences of age-related gains.