The interactive effect of subjective age and subjective distance-to-death on psychological distress of older adults

Objectives: Subjective age refers to how young or old people experience themselves to be, while subjective distance-to-death reflects how far or close they experience themselves to be from their death. The present study examined whether subjective age and subjective distance-to-death interact in predicting psychological distress.

Method: A sample of 1073 community-dwelling older adults at the age range of 50-86 (M = 58.1, SD = 5.3) evaluated their subjective age, subjective distance-to-death, psychological distress, and rated several measures of physical health.

Results: After controlling for background characteristics and physical health indices, perceiving death as far and reporting younger subjective age predicted lower psychological distress. The combination of feeling close to death and older subjective age was related to the highest ratings of psychological distress. Moreover, the effect of subjective distance-to-death on psychological distress was mitigated by younger subjective age.

Conclusion: The findings underscore the importance of an integrative view of two time perspectives - one that focuses on time since birth and another that concerns time left till death - to psychological distress of older adults.