• Posted August 14, 2026

Expect Other Seniors To Act Their Age? Then Expect Problems With Your Own Memory, Study Says

They say you’re as old as you feel, but you also might be as old as you expect other seniors to behave, a new study says.

Older folks who have strong beliefs about “acting one’s age” tend to report more memory problems, researchers reported Aug. 10 in the International Journal of Behavioral Development.

What’s more, these memory problems fluctuate with how harshly a senior is judging his or her peers on any given day, researchers found.

“In other words, on days when someone had more pronounced ageist attitudes, they also had more memory problems,” lead researcher Shevaun Neupert said in a news release.

“For example, one person might have very strong ageist attitudes on a Monday, but weak ageist attitudes on a Friday, and that person likely also reported significantly more memory failures on Monday than on Friday,” Neupert said. She is a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

For the new study, researchers recruited nearly 1,000 people ages 50 to 94 in nine countries around the world, and asked the participants to complete a survey every day for two weeks.

The survey measured each participant’s ageist attitudes, as well as the number of memory failures they experienced that day.

“Ageist attitudes, in this context, refers to how people think older adults should behave — the restrictions or prescriptive ideas that someone places on what older adults should and should not do,” Neupert said. “We wanted to know if there is any relationship between these attitudes and memory.”

Results showed that people reported more daily memory failures if they had strong views about how their fellow seniors should act. On days when they were more judgmental, they had more memory problems.

Interestingly, the results were consistent across all nine countries in the study, including the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, India, China, Israel and Turkey.

“The results were not really influenced by where the study participants were,” Neupert said. “People who had more ageist attitudes had more pronounced memory failures, regardless of whether they were in China, Ukraine or the United States. That’s significant because aging, ageism and memory loss are all important issues around the world.”

It might be that seniors with ageist attitudes expect to have more memory problems because that fits with their strong beliefs, researchers said. They also might notice their daily memory failures more frequently because they expect to have them.

“More research can help us understand what might be behind the correlation we’ve identified here, but our study suggests that tackling ageism on a broad, social level could have meaningful benefits for older adults everywhere,” Neupert said.

More information

The American Psychological Association has more on ageism.

SOURCES: North Carolina State University, news release, Aug. 10, 2026; International Journal of Behavioral Development, Aug. 10, 2026