The 9 percent gait improvement reported in this study is also similar to the gains reported in other studies of the effects of 12 weeks of strength training on walking in older persons.
For his studies of gait, Hausdorff has developed special wafer-thin shoe inserts with recording devices in attached ankle straps. This way, he can measure natural stride-to-stride variations. Typically, the time a foot spends in the air for each step, known as "swing time," decreases with aging. But in this study, the positive steretypes of aging also improved this aspect of walking.
For this study, Hausdorff teamed up with social psychologist Becca Levy PhD, who first developed this method of triggering aging stereotypes to examine their effects on thinking and behavior when she was a graduate student at Harvard College. Levy conducted the gait study as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. Now she is an assistant professor at Yale University Medical School. In other work, Levy has found that stereotypes of aging also affect memory, self confidence, handwriting and even the will to live in older people.
"Individuals tend to acquire negative stereotypes about aging as young as 3," Levy says. "When individuals become older, these stereotypes become relevant to themselves. Unlike stereotypes of race or sex, stereotypes of aging become directly relevant to everyone who lives a normal lifespan. This latest study with gait demonstrates that the negative stereotypes of aging that exist in our culture may have numerous implications for everyone who is already or who will one day become old."
The authors plan to continue studying the unanticipated powerful connection between subconscious p
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Contact: Carol Cruzan Morton or Bill Schaller
cmorton@caregroup.harvard.edu,wschalle@caregroup.harvard.edu
617-667-4431
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
1-Nov-1999