Daily fluctuations in subjective age among older adults: links with stressors, positive events, and emotional reactions

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.