Answer: Allow them to have as much control over their everyday activities as possible.

Click here to listen to Ellen Langer discuss her famous Arden House nursing home study where elderly residents who were allowed to make simple choices in their daily lives lived longer and were generally more vital than residents not granted these simple choices. You’ll find much food for thought in this talk.

The 30-minute talk  was part of the Mind Changers series by BBC Radio (17 Aug 2009).

From the BBC’s website:

Claudia Hammond presents a series looking at the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century.She re-visits Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin’s 1976 study, conducted in a New England nursing home, Arden House.

When the two psychologists set up the experiment so that residents on two floors of the 360-bed home for the elderly would experience some changes in their everyday life, they had no idea that they were introducing factors which could prolong life.

While residents on both floors were given plants and film shows, only those on the fourth floor had the opportunity to control these events: choosing the plant and looking after it themselves, and choosing which night of the week to view the film.

Eighteen months later, when Langer and Rodin returned to the home, they were astonished to discover that twice as many of the elderly residents in this ‘choices’ group were alive, compared with the control group on the second floor, who had been given plants that the staff tended, and were told which was their film night. It appeared that taking control made you live longer.