What is psychological age and how to determine it

What is psychological age

The psychological age of Douglas K. Symons. Psychological Age / Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development is the number of years that can be attributed to a person in accordance with his way of thinking and behavior.

Psychological, or mental Mental age / Britannica, age is not always equal to the passport age. For example, younger adolescents often behave and think like mature boys and girls. And people over the age of 60, passionate about gadgets, social networks, travel, in terms of behavior can be similar to 30-year-olds.

Why determine psychological age

A lot of quite physical things depend on how old you are mentally.

So, there are studies by Maria Mitina, Sergey Young, and Alex Zhavoronkov. Psychological aging, depression, and well-being / Aging (Albany NY), which establish a curious connection: the younger a person feels, the stronger his health, better memory and learning abilities. And even longer life.

True, scientists still argue about what is the cause and what is the effect. Perhaps well-being and a quick mind stem from a young psychological age. Or maybe it's the other way around: a person subjectively feels younger only because he has excellent health and strong memory for a long time.

Be that as it may, knowing how young you are mentally can clarify some points in your well-being. And the psychological age is corrected by Susan Krauss Whitbourne. What's Your True Age? / Psychology Today.

For example, if you find yourself mentally too old, this is a good reason to add more physical activity to your daily routine. And to force oneself to lead a more "young" lifestyle: to communicate more actively, to be interested in new gadgets and scientific breakthroughs, to do everything to stop associating oneself with old age. All of this will help you feel younger. And then the connection established by research will work and, according to scientists, your physical and mental health will be tightened up to the psychological age.

However, not always a young mental age is good. Emotional impulses and incontinence are characteristic of youth. If this is about you, then perhaps psychologically you should become more mature.

How to determine psychological age

Perhaps the easiest way to find this out came from Susan Krauss Whitbourne. What's Your True Age? / Psychology Today American athlete and baseball legend Satchel Page. It is enough to answer a simple question.

Satchel Paige Pitcher.

How old do you think you would be if you did not know how old you are?

But most often people find it difficult to determine their psychological age. And this, in general, is to be expected: after all, even psychologists cannot unequivocally answer the question of how old a particular person is of mental age.

There are many tests out there. Some of them are based on well-being and the model of behavior that a person expects from himself.

Others, such as this This Quiz Is Scientifically Proven To Guess How Old Your Brain Is / Buzzfeed by Buzzfeed, take into account not so much self-awareness as a person's background: how aware he is of various events in the world, what he is interested in, what level of education he has.

Still others are based on the brightness of the perception of the world. For example, here's a video to suggest your mental age based on how you perceive shades:

But in fact, all these tests are more like self-indulgence.

To date, there is only one study that has a more or less scientific basis. This is a questionnaire developed by Deep Longevity. The company is an artificial intelligence app maker whose goal is to track the aging process and help people prolong healthy and productive lives.

The test methodology is described in detail by Alex Zhavoronkov, Kirill Kochetov, Peter Diamandis, Maria Mitina. PsychoAge and SubjAge: development of deep markers of psychological and subjective age using artificial intelligence in the profile scientific journal Aging. Experts trained the neural network by uploading over 10 thousand questionnaires of people from 25 to 75 years old. Artificial intelligence analyzed their answers to the same questions, correlating them with the passport and subjective psychological age of the participants. And I found out what judgments are most typical for representatives of different mental age groups.

The test consists of 18 simple questions. Answer them and the trained system will tell you how old you are approximately. However, so far the questionnaire is available only in English and Spanish. If you don't speak any of these languages, use Google Translate, for example.

Determine psychological age →