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Longitudinal Findings on Aging-Related Cognitions, Control Beliefs, and Health in Later Life

¹ German Centre of Gerontology, Berlin, Germany.
² Department of Developmental Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany.

Address correspondence to Susanne Wurm, German Centre of Gerontology, Manfred von Richthofen Strasse 2, 12101 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: susanne.wurm{at}dza.de

We examined the influence of individual views of aging on health changes in later life. We hypothesized that aging-related cognitions affect health changes irrespective of control beliefs and that the impact of aging-related cognitions on health is higher than for the reverse direction of causality. We based our analyses on data from the longitudinal part of the German Aging Survey (N = 1,286; participants were 40–85 years of age at baseline). Because of the selectivity of the sample, we also computed the same analyses for the baseline sample (N = 4,034) with estimated Time 2 data for those individuals who dropped out. The results of structural equation modeling were concordant with our hypotheses, and therefore they corroborate previous findings on the importance of beliefs about aging.