06/25/2025
By Renee Hunsberger

The College of Fine Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, Department of Psychology invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation defense by Renee Hunsberger on “The Relationship Between Subjective Age and Metacognition in Older Adults.”

Candidate Name: Renee Hunsberger
Degree: Doctoral
Defense Date: Monday, July 14, 2025
Time: Noon to 2:00 p.m.
Location: Virtual Meeting via Zoom. Please contact renee_hunsberger@student.uml.edu for link to attend.

Dissertation Title: The Relationship Between Subjective Age and Metacognition in Older Adults

Committee:

  • Advisor Lisa Geraci, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Megan Papesh, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell
  • Steve Balsis, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Brief Abstract:
While chronological age is the most common metric for assessing a person’s age, it often fails to capture the lived experience of aging. An alternative is subjective age—how old a person feels—which has been shown to predict a range of physical and mental health outcomes. It is often assumed that subjective age is influenced by metacognitive beliefs about aging: individuals’ perceptions of how aging affects their cognitive abilities and their capacity to monitor or manage these changes. However, this assumption has not been systematically tested.
Across three studies, we investigated whether metacognitive beliefs about one’s memory contribute to how old individuals feel. We examined whether different types of metacognitive judgments contribute to subjective age, including both dispositional measures of metacognition (“offline” metacognition) in the form of questionnaires, and task-specific metacognitive judgments (“online” metacognition). We also examined whether the context influences this relationship. For example, does the relationship between metacognitive information and subjective age depend on whether older adults are engaging in a memory task (Studies 1, 2, and 3) or simply expecting to engage in a memory task (Study 3). Lastly, we were also interested in whether psychosocial beliefs, physical health perceptions, and psychological growth contribute to older adults’ subjective age and moderate the relationship between subjective age and metacognition.

Results suggest that in a range of contexts, older adults rely on their perceptions of physical health and ageing to inform their subjective age. In particular, at baseline, when older adults expected to take a memory task, and when they were actively engaging in a memory task, older adults who had more positive perceptions of ageing and physical health felt younger (relative to those who had more negative perceptions of ageing and physical health).

In addition, certain types of metacognition contributed to subjective age. Across all three studies (Studies 1, 2, and 3) the accuracy of older adults’ online metacognitive judgements contributed to subjective age. Older adults who were overconfident in their metacognitive judgements felt older, relative to older adults who are underconfident. Study 3 suggested that this relationship may partially be due to the perceived difficulty of the task.

These results have implications for our understanding of subjective age. These results also have practical implications. They suggest that metacognitive experiences during memory assessments influence subjective age. These results may generalize to situations in which older adults are asked to evaluate or reflect on their cognitive abilities—such as during cognitive assessments, medical evaluations, or even with everyday memory challenges. These metacognitive experiences may influence their self perceptions of aging.