Age-driven transformations of the human mind
The human personality evolves over time and follows a sequence of stages defined by several psychological theories. Freudian psychology classifies the five stages according to psychosexual tension. In Erickson’s psychology, psychosocial conflicts characteristic of different age groups cause personality development. Freudian personality development theory mostly focuses on childhood and adolescence, while Erickson’s theory stipulates that development continues into adulthood and old age.
These theories describe how people obtain integral personality traits and build identity, confidence, and trust. However, these traits do not fully define them. For example, knowing that a person is timid or bold indicates how likely they are to be communicative but tells nothing of what motivates them to interact with other people.
Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) is a theory of human motivation that explains how priorities shift with age. Originally developed by Laura Carstensen in the 1990s, this theory posits that as people grow older, their goals become consumptive rather than preparatory. Future goals become less important due to a dwindling lifespan, and realizable goals take priority [1]. Emotionally meaningful and pleasing activities also take priority over exploratory, career-building, and knowledge-acquisition activities.
Motivation does not only affect how we make conscious decisions. Age-related shifts also determine what aspects of reality we pay attention to and remember. The positivity effect is a cognitive bias that makes positive emotional information appear more important than negative emotional information. In controlled studies, younger participants do not display a positivity effect, while older participants are much likelier to recall emotionally positive images [2]. This effect is out of one’s conscious control and is not a coping mechanism; it is the direct effect of how motivation helps shape the reality inside one’s mind [3].
Interestingly, life events that reduce one’s event horizon, such as distant relocation or grave diseases, can simulate aging-related shifts in motivation [5]. Even negative news that reminds one of life’s fragility can lead to a similar reaction [6].
SST’s framework enables a new way of studying aging. People in their twenties who exhibit a high positivity effect and prefer emotionally meaningful goals to career-building objectives will experience an accelerated psychological aging process. We trained a neural network that estimates psychological age using a questionnaire. All the questions relate to one of the six well-being parameters defined by Carol Ryff:
- Self-acceptance,
- Personal growth,
- Purpose in life,
- Environmental mastery,
- Autonomy, and
- Positive relations with others.
In accordance with SST, we have shown that older people score higher in positive relations than younger people, but their personal growth and purpose-in-life scores are lower. Older people also display higher autonomy (independence from opinions) and environmental mastery (the ability to navigate everyday challenges).
Our model also captures time-dependent trends in human psychology and can estimate one’s future well-being based on a current psychological profile. Ultimately, we used the model to create a map of psychotypes that contain three clusters with different propensities for depression. The map can be used to find a psychotype that best fits an individual and to show the path of small incremental changes that he or she must enact to arrive there [7].
The psychological aging clock, the future well-being predictor and the map that navigates people toward mental stability form the core of FuturSelf, a free mental health application that provides personalized guidance toward long-term mental well-being. After a short survey, users receive a report stating their psychological age and well-being trajectories and a steady flow of tips for reaching high mental resilience.
FuturSelf allows users to gain control over their life priorities and achieve a balanced improvement in their mental state. The data we will collect through FuturSelf will serve as the material for follow-up studies intended to answer more questions related to well-being, the psychological effects of aging, and the fluidity of psychotypes.
