Grant: CIHR Fellowship

In Canada, older adults represent the fastest growing demographic. This shift towards an aging population presents significant challenges for individuals and society. Specifically, health-care systems will be profoundly affected by the continued increase of the elderly population. In 2019 alone, health-care spending on Canadians aged 65 and older accounted for 45.7% of total health-care expenditures, projected rise to 71.4% in 2040. Declines in physical health remain common and have significant financial and societal implications. This underscores the need for a better understanding of the psychological risk factors that can reduce well-being and trigger mental and physical health problems in older age. My postdoctoral research program seeks to address this challenge by identifying late life experiences of regret as a psychological risk factor that affects mental and physical health in old age. Regret is a negative psychological state that involves blaming ourselves for a bad outcome or feeling a sense of loss or sorrow at what might have been. The research will focus on how experiences of regret can jeopardize older adults' mental health (e.g., depression), health behaviours (e.g., physical activity and sleep), physiological processes (e.g., hormonal and immune regulation), and physical health (e.g., chronic disease) over 14 years, and whether such changes are mitigated by intervening demographic (e.g., age, sex) and psychosocial factors (e.g., social support). Importantly, my research will develop and test a novel regret-reducing intervention to improve mental and physical health in late life. This research may have significant implications to the extent that decreasing the frequency and intensity of regret experiences has the potential to improve the mental and physical health of older adults and offset mounting costs facing the Canadian health care system.