A new study by scientists at Yale University suggests that older adults can and do improve over time, and that this improvement is partly due to their mindset toward aging. Becca R. Levy, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), found that nearly half of adults aged 65 and older showed measurable improvement in cognitive function, physical function, or both, over time. The findings are published in the journal Geriatrics.

Researchers followed more than 11,000 participants in the Health and Retirement Study, a federally supported longitudinal survey of older Americans. They tracked changes in cognition using a global performance assessment, and physical function using walking speed – generally considered to be a “vital sign” because of its strong links to disability, hospitalization, and mortality.

“Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” said Levy. “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.”

According to the study, about 32% of the participants improved cognitively and 28% improved physically over a follow-up period of up to 12 years. Levy noted that these gains disappeared when they only looked at averages, but when they examined individual trajectories, a meaningful percentage of the older participants had improved.

The researchers posited potential reasons for why some people improve and some do not. They hypothesized that an important factor could be participants’ baseline age beliefs. This refers to whether they had more positive or more negative views about aging at the start of the study. They found that those with more positive age beliefs were significantly more likely to show improvements in both cognition and walking speed, even after accounting for factors such as age, sex, education, chronic disease, depression, and length of follow-up.

These findings build on Levy’s stereotype embodiment theory, which posits that age stereotypes absorbed from culture – through a range of domains including social media and advertisements – eventually become self-relevant and biologically consequential. Levy’s prior studies have found negative age beliefs predict poorer memory, slower walking speed, higher cardiovascular risk, and biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Our findings suggest there is often a reserve capacity for improvement in later life,” Levy said. “And because age beliefs are modifiable, this opens the door to interventions at both the individual and societal level.”