By John Salak –
As if this weren’t already apparent, older people are cool. Now, science is confirming what was already realized by hundreds of millions of others. In fact, older adults stay cool as temps rise, not just in personality but in their ability to regulate body temperature, according to new research highlighting the resilience of seniors.
When it’s hot outside—or inside—and younger adults get overheated and lose their cool, older adults are better able to control their emotional responses to rising temperatures.
Washington State University’s research on heat response discovered that age was the only consistent factor that moderated a person’s emotional response to rising temperatures.
The university was quick to point out that rising temperatures can make everyone, including mature adults, uncomfortable. However, the researchers found that the actual temperature at which the majority of people felt uncomfortable during a hot summer depended on the individual. When they did feel discomfort, however, it often negatively affected their mood.
Older adults on average become more uncomfortable in high heat sooner than younger people, but the research showed it did not affect their mood as much as others. Their muted response admittedly is surprising given how uncomfortable they can become.
“Older adults, in general, have worse thermoregulation, so this makes them more vulnerable to heat—so that was not surprising—but what was really interesting is that on average, older adults showed low levels of negative emotional states, even though they experienced more discomfort in the heat,” explained Kim Meidenbauer, a psychology researcher at the university and the study’s lead author.
The research didn’t pin down exactly why older adults are able to remain emotionally cool. Meidenbauer, nonetheless, theorized that the explanation may lie in previous research on personality traits that revealed that emotional stability tends to increase with age.
The aim of the research was to better understand why high outside temperatures are associated with increases in violent crime and mental health hospital admissions. Since negative emotional states are linked to people acting out aggressively, the researchers sought to investigate the connection between outside temperature, physical discomfort and “negative affect,” such as feeling irritable, anxious or gloomy.
The effort involved recruiting about 400 participants in the Chicago area who used an app to report levels of comfort and emotional states while outside during the summer of 2022. The research team also used geolocation to determine the actual temperature at the time and place when the participants logged their self-reports.
Surprisingly, the study found no direct connection between the actual temperature outside and people’s emotional states. Perceived temperature—how hot they felt it was—was more important. Yet individual reactions varied widely on whether the temperature caused discomfort leading to a negative mood.
“People really varied in the extent to which they found consistently extreme temperatures as hot or uncomfortable. Some people were experiencing 100-degree days, and they were still feeling good,” said Meidenbauer.
When the participants did feel that discomfort though, more of them, and especially the younger adults, had an associated negative emotional state.
“This research is suggesting that for some people there is a really strong relationship between heat and negative affect working through discomfort,” she said. “Because there is also an association between being in a particularly angry or irritable emotional state and then acting out aggressively—this is a plausible mechanism at play.”
The findings may provide significant insights going forward especially as temperatures continue to rise and America continues to age. Currently, there are more than 55 million people over the age of 65 in the U.S., representing about one-sixth of the population.
And while older adults may stay emotionally calm in response to rising temperatures, AARP warns that mature individuals are still at particular risk for heat exposure. The association notes that heat-related deaths in the U.S. are at risk and that “most people who die from the heat are over the age of 50.”
The issue for older adults is body function. “It has everything to do with our body’s ability to deal with heat as we age,” Dr. Aaron Bernstein explained in an AARP article. “People who are older, our bodies may not be able to dissipate heat as well as people who are younger. We also tend to have more chronic health problems and may take more medications that affect our body’s ability to deal with heat.”
