Becca R. Levy, a psychiatrist at Yale, has found striking correlations between people’s attitudes toward old age and how they fare in their later years, with effects starting as early as middle age. In one study, those who had more positive views of old age, measured by how they answered the question, “When you think of old persons, what are the first five words or phrases that come to mind?” were 44 percent more likely to recover from a disability than those with negative age stereotypes.
