A new study, published recently in the Journal of Gerontology Psychological Sciences, has shown that older adults aged 60 and above have coped much better emotionally to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic than younger and middle-aged adults.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) collected daily diary data from mid-March to mid-April this year and found that the elderly experienced greater emotional well-being and felt less stressed or threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lead author of the study Patrick Klaiber of UBC Department of Psychology said, “Our findings provide new evidence that older adults are emotionally resilient despite public discourse often portraying their vulnerability. We also found that younger adults are at greater risk for loneliness and psychological distress during the pandemic.”
The researchers examined more than 770 participants aged between 18 and 91, who lived in the U.S. and Canada. The participants were asked about their stressors, positive events, and emotional well-being during the first few weeks of the pandemic.
Klaiber said, “Younger and middle-aged adults are faced with family- and work-related challenges, such as working from home, homeschooling children, and unemployment. They are also more likely to experience different types of ongoing non-pandemic stressors than older adults, such as interpersonal conflicts.”
“While older adults are faced with stressors such as higher rates of disease contraction, severe complications, and mortality from COVID-19, they also possess more coping skills to deal with stress as they are older and wiser,” he added.
The researchers also found that older and middle-aged individuals experienced daily positive events, such as remote positive social interactions, which helped boost their positive emotions.
“While positive events led to increases in positive emotions for all three age groups, younger adults had the least positive events but also benefited the most from them,” Klaiber said. “This is a good reminder for younger adults to create more opportunities for physically-distanced or remote positive experiences as a way of mitigating distress during the pandemic,” he added.
