The Impact of Exposure to War and War-Related Stressors on Subjective Age and Accelerated Aging:

TL;DR

This study explores how war and war-related stress affect how older adults feel about their age and aging process.

Contribution

The study provides new empirical evidence on the impact of war exposure on subjective aging in older adults.

Findings

Daily war-related stressors did not significantly affect daily subjective age or accelerated aging.

Greater exposure to war-related events was associated with feeling older on a between-person level.

Findings will be expanded with a second sample from Israel during the Israel-Hamas war.

Abstract

Previous research shows that the experience of adversity and extreme life events can have an impact on the experience of aging (e.g., Avidor et al., 2016; Hoffman et al., 2022). Still, empirical evidence is sparse regarding the impact of war experiences, especially in short-term and daily contexts. We thus investigated the role of exposure to war-related events, stressors, and their experience on subjective age and subjective accelerated aging in two samples of older adults exposed to war. The first sample includes N = 71 adults aged 50-78 years from the Ukraine, who reported on their exposure to war-related events as well as their daily experience of aging, and daily war-related stressors over 14 days during the third year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Multilevel regression analyses found that there was no effect of daily war-related stressors on daily subjective age (b = .45, p = .14) or accelerated aging (b = .11, p = .08), but on the between-person level, more exposure to war-related events was associated with feeling older (b = 1.10, p <.001). We will expand these findings with a second sample of Israeli adults aged 45 to 70, who reported on the same variables weekly over six weeks during the Israel-Hamas war in early 2025. Our findings inform theoretical models aimed to understand how extreme adversity and disasters affects older adults’ experience of aging.