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Let’s try something.

Take a moment and imagine yourself in old age. Not just a more wrinkled version of your face or more gray in your hair, but the bigger stuff, too: What do you do? How do you feel?

There’s no shortage of stereotypes to choose from: Are you in the prime of your life, the golden years, dispensing an endless stream of wisdom? Or are you cantankerous, forgetful, fearful of your own decline? In this imaginary scenario, are you spry or wizened? Are you beloved by your family, or are you their burden?

The answers to these hypothetical questions matter in very real ways.

Becca Levy, the director of social and behavioral sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, has spent much of her career examining how cultural perceptions of aging affect the health of the elderly. In one 2002 study, she and her colleagues analyzed data collected from 660 seniors over a quarter-century; those with an optimistic view of old age lived an average of 7.5 years longer than those with a pessimistic view, even after controlling for factors like overall health, socioeconomic status, and loneliness. In another study, this one from 2012, a team of researchers followed 598 people over the age of 70 as they recovered from disabling injuries or illnesses. Sure enough, those with more positive ideas of aging were more likely to make a full recovery.

Across the board, the studies pointed to the same conclusion: A person’s attitude towards old age affects how they fare once they reach it. Or, as The New York Times summed it up in a 2012 article on Levy’s work, “Old people become what they think.”

Which raises another question: Can what they think be changed?

In a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science, Levy and researchers from Yale and the University of California Berkeley set out to learn the answer by studying 100 volunteers between the ages of 61 and 99 (the average age was 81). One group of participants was asked to write a story about “a senior citizen who is mentally and physically healthy,” while another group completed a subliminal-messaging computer task where positive aging-related words—“spry” or “wise,” for example—flashed across the screen too quickly for them to detect on a conscious level. As a control, others were asked to complete neutral versions of the same activities, either writing a story on a topic unrelated to aging or watching a screen with flashes of nonsense strings of letters.

The volunteers completed their respective tasks once a week for five weeks. At the beginning of the experiment and once weekly for three weeks after it ended, they also took three different tests: one that measured their attitudes towards old age in general; one that measured their perceptions of themselves as people of advanced age; and one that tested their gait, strength, and balance, or what the researchers called “physical functioning.”

The positive aging stories, the researchers noted, improved the participants' view of aging overall, but “yielded no significant effects” on either of the other measures—for the most part, those volunteers were no better off after writing the stories than they were before, either physically or in terms of their own self-image. In fact, the only participants who saw notable differences across all categories between the beginning and end of the experiment were the ones who had been exposed to the subliminal messages. (“Implicit messages,” as the researchers phrased it, certainly seems like a friendlier term than “subliminal messages,” which typically conjures up ideas of more sinister intentions. See: George W. Bush’s “RATS” election ad from 2000, or that Simpsons episode about the Navy recruitment spot disguised as a music video.)