Or does feeling old due to other factors make people less interested in the sexual aspect of life?
While neuroticism was identified as a part of the psychological aging core, it was also a uniquely important subjective aging feature in the elderly MIDUS 1 subsample. This may be interpreted as neuroticism progressing unnoticed by an individual until old age when it starts to affect the perception of age. Previous studies identified that neuroticism tends to cause low emotional differentiation, anxiety, and depression in old people [28, 29].
Increasing values for the variables from the relationships category were associated with lower PsychoAge and SubjAge, thus favoring single people content with their sex life, who expected to remain sexually active in 10 years
Other personality traits rendered important for subjective age estimation in the elderly were optimism, being outgoing, and content with life in general. These results indicate that these might be top-priority features to focus on while developing policies aimed to involve the elderly in social life. Continue reading “In this case, it is difficult to conclude the cause-effect relation between psychological aging and sexuality”