What makes older adults feel loved? The shared agreement on expressions of love in daily life and individual differences in the consensus judgments among older adults

Social connection is a key ingredient for healthy aging; however, the specific experiencesof daily living that make most older adults feel loved have not been studiedsystematically. To fill this gap, we surveyed a representative sample (N=408) of USadults over 65 years of age. They were asked to judge 61 everyday life experiencesfor their potential to generate loving feelings. We applied Cultural Consensus Theoryto uncover the shared agreement on expressions of love among older adults andtested whether there was a consensus among them. We identified the daily life experiencesthat older adults believe make most people feel loved and found that therewas a shared agreement on these. However, participants differed in terms of theirknowledge of the shared agreement: higher levels of consensus knowledge on dailylife experiences of love were credibly linked to higher levels of compassion and beingfemale.