The study, led by Peck Tiang Joanna Yeo, Rayner Kay Jin Tan, and Miho Asano of the National University of Singapore, with Asano also affiliated with the University of British Columbia, is notable for a simple but consequential framing decision. Whereas the vast majority of successful-aging research canvasses people who are already old, Yeo and her colleagues turned the lens on the cohort that will become Singapore’s next generation of elderly citizens. The rationale is straightforward: expectations, anxieties, and support needs formed in midlife may differ substantially from those of today’s 75-year-olds, shaped as they are by different economic conditions, family structures, and cultural attitudes toward health and money. If aging policy is built only around the experiences of current elders, it risks addressing yesterday’s needs rather than tomorrow’s.

To capture those forward-looking perspectives, the team conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 30 middle-aged Singaporeans, probing how participants understood successful aging, what they believed they would need to achieve it, and whether existing state initiatives aligned with those needs. Interview data were subjected to thematic analysis, a rigorous qualitative technique in which researchers systematically code transcripts to identify recurring patterns of meaning across respondents. This method does not quantify how common a view is; instead, it maps the conceptual terrain, revealing the dimensions along which ordinary people organize complex life goals. From the transcripts, four dominant themes crystallized: physical, financial, social, and psychological health, each subdivided into finer subthemes that together paint a granular portrait of what a good old age means to Singapore’s midlife generation.

The physical health theme, perhaps unsurprisingly, centered on staying functional. But the study’s most provocative finding lies in how participants related to disease and disability. Rather than imagining successful aging as the complete avoidance of age-related illness—an ideal long associated with the influential Rowe and Kahn model, which defined successful aging as low probability of disease, high cognitive and physical function, and active engagement with life—many middle-aged respondents felt that accepting age-related diseases and functional disabilities as an expected part of later life was itself a marker of aging successfully. In other words, success was reframed not as the absence of decline but as the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to it. This echoes a broader shift in gerontology away from rigid biomedical definitions, which studies have repeatedly shown describe only a small fraction of older adults, toward multidimensional and self-rated conceptions in which people managing chronic conditions can still consider themselves aging well.

The financial theme proved equally emphatic, and arguably the study’s most actionable finding. Participants consistently identified early financial preparation as a prerequisite for the old age they envisioned. Middle-aged Singaporeans described the need to save, plan, and acquire financial literacy decades before retirement, viewing later-life security as something constructed incrementally through the working years rather than patched together at their end. This aligns with a substantial empirical literature linking financial literacy to retirement planning outcomes across countries, from the United States to Finland, and to financial resilience in middle and older adulthood. It also reflects a distinctly Singaporean context: the city-state’s retirement income architecture, built around the Central Provident Fund and personal responsibility, places considerable weight on individual foresight, making the timing of financial preparation a genuine determinant of later-life welfare.

Social and psychological dimensions rounded out the picture. On the social front, participants emphasized maintaining relationships, staying connected to family and community, and guarding against the loneliness that decades of prospective research have linked to declining health in old age. Psychologically, respondents spoke of cultivating resilience, realistic expectations, and a sense of purpose—capacities that gerontological research suggests buffer well-being against the inevitable losses that accompany aging. Notably, studies on expectations have found that neither blind optimism nor corrosive pessimism serves people well when health deteriorates; instead, a calibrated realism about what lies ahead appears protective. The middle-aged Singaporeans in this study seemed to intuit precisely that, describing a stance toward the future that was neither denial nor dread but pragmatic preparation.

The second half of the study is what elevates it from descriptive to prescriptive. The researchers systematically compared their identified themes and subthemes against the Singapore 2023 Action Plan for Successful Ageing, the government’s national framework of initiatives spanning health promotion, lifelong learning, senior employment, and age-friendly environments. This audit revealed two distinct categories of misalignment, which the authors label temporal and contextual mismatches. Temporal mismatches are cases where the Action Plan already offers the right kind of support, but at the wrong life stage—initiatives aimed at current seniors that would serve middle-aged adults equally well if accessed later, requiring no redesign of the initiatives themselves. Contextual mismatches are more demanding: needs expressed by future older adults that current initiatives simply do not address in their present form, and which would require genuine tailoring or entirely new provision.

The distinction matters practically. If the gap between what future elders need and what the state provides is purely temporal, policymakers can simply extend the runway—communicating earlier, enrolling earlier, and encouraging midlife engagement with programs already on the books. But contextual mismatches signal genuine blind spots. The study’s findings suggest, for example, that supporting people to psychologically reframe disease and disability as a normal part of aging, and to begin serious financial preparation in their thirties and forties, may not be adequately covered by initiatives calibrated to the current elderly population. Closing those gaps, the authors argue, is essential if the Action Plan is to serve the people who will actually depend on it in the coming decades.

The demographic stakes could hardly be higher. Singapore’s population is aging at a pace few nations have experienced, compressing into a single generation a transition that took European societies a century. Ongoing research has documented the country’s rapid shift, with rising life expectancy, falling fertility, and a shrinking ratio of working-age adults to seniors. Globally, life expectancy has climbed continuously for over 150 years, and extending healthspan—years lived in good function, not merely years lived—has become a central goal of public health. For Singapore, a young nation confronting an old-age profile, the question is not whether its population will age but whether its institutions will anticipate the needs of those aging.

By filling a genuine gap in the literature—the perspectives of future rather than current older adults—the study offers service providers and policymakers evidence-based targets for intervention. Its recommendations are unsentimental: help people internalize realistic expectations about bodily decline, and help them build financial buffers early. Neither message is glamorous, and neither fits the aspirational tone that has sometimes drawn criticism to the successful-aging concept, which scholars have argued can moralize aging and shift blame onto individuals who fail to meet unrealistic standards. Yet the middle-aged Singaporeans interviewed here offer a grounded counterpoint—a vision of success built not on defying age but on preparing for it, financially, socially, and psychologically, long before it arrives.

Subject of Research: Perspectives on successful aging among middle-aged future older adults in Singapore and their alignment with national aging policy

Article Title: Successful Aging in Singapore: An Exploration of Perspectives Among the Future Older Adults

Article References: Yeo, P. T. J., Tan, R. K. J., & Asano, M. (2026). Successful Aging in Singapore: An Exploration of Perspectives Among the Future Older Adults. Ageing International, 51(3), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-026-09674-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12126-026-09674-8

Keywords: successful aging, future older adults, Singapore, gerontology, qualitative interviews, financial preparation, ageing policy, physical health, psychological health, Action Plan for Successful Ageing, middle-aged adults, thematic analysis

Since Andrew Przybylski and colleagues first formalized the construct in 2013, fear of missing out has been defined by two features: a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, and the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. The first feature is largely cognitive and emotional in character, resembling worry or repetitive negative thinking about social exclusion. The second is more behavioral, functioning much like a safety behavior—frequently checking social media and messaging apps to reduce anxiety about missing rewarding experiences. Researchers have labeled these dimensions “apprehension of missing out” and “constant connection desire,” and while they are conceptually and statistically related, they are increasingly understood as distinct constructs.

The distinction matters because the two dimensions, if truly separable, might respond to different interventions and predict different downstream behaviors. A purely emotional apprehension about exclusion might be expected to travel with mood disturbance, while a behavioral drive to remain connected might be expected to manifest in compulsive device checking. Whether the empirical data support this tidy division has, until recently, been unclear, since most studies have measured FOMO as a single total score and correlated it with outcomes in aggregate.

The study was led by Jon D. Elhai of the University of Toledo, working with Tali Gazit of Bar-Ilan University, Silvia Casale of the University of Florence, and Christian Montag of the University of Macau. Between January and December 2025, the team recruited 388 undergraduate students from Introductory Psychology courses at a medium-sized Midwestern US university. Participants completed a cross-sectional web survey hosted on Psychdata.com and received course research points for taking part. The university’s Institutional Review Board approved the study before data collection began, and all participants provided informed consent.

The researchers applied careful data-cleaning procedures to ensure the quality of their sample. From an initial 422 rows of data, they excluded 14 participants who provided substantial missing data, six duplicate responses, four overly fast completers who finished in under 215 seconds, six participants younger than 18, one participant flagged by longstring detection for giving 23 consecutive identical answers, and three participants who reported not using social media at all. The final sample averaged 20.06 years of age (SD = 4.18), was roughly two-thirds female (65.7%), and was predominantly Caucasian (69.8%), with Black, Asian, and Hispanic/Latino participants also represented. Most participants were freshmen, and most worked part-time or not at all.

Participants completed a battery of validated self-report measures. FOMO was assessed with the ten-item FOMO Scale, whose items the researchers mapped onto seven apprehension items and three connection desire items following procedures established in prior work. Problematic smartphone use was measured with the Smartphone Addiction Scale–Short Version, and problematic social media use with the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. Negative affectivity was captured through the depression and anxiety subscales of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale–21, the brooding subscale of the Ruminative Responses Scale–10, and the Distress Tolerance Scale—which the team rescored so that higher values indicated worse distress tolerance, aligning the direction of all measures toward pathological responding. Internal consistency was strong across most scales, ranging from coefficient alpha 0.82 to 0.92, with one notable exception: the three-item connection desire subscale showed relatively low reliability (alpha = 0.60, omega = 0.62), a limitation the authors attribute to its brevity.

Analysis proceeded in two stages. After imputing small amounts of missing item-level data—only 0.63% of item values were missing, and the missingness was statistically consistent with data missing completely at random—the team ran confirmatory factor analyses in Mplus, treating questionnaire items as ordinal given their limited response options. They first tested a single-factor FOMO model against the two-factor apprehension/connection desire model, using chi-square difference testing to compare fit. They then built combined models pairing the two FOMO factors with each other construct, using Wald chi-square tests with parameter constraints to determine whether the two FOMO dimensions correlated differentially with problematic smartphone use, problematic social media use, depression, anxiety, brooding rumination, or distress tolerance. This two-step logic—establishing the dimensional structure before testing differential correlates—guards against drawing conclusions about distinct facets from a measure that may not in fact be multidimensional.

The psychometric results supported treating FOMO as two-dimensional, though the advantage was modest. The two-factor model fit significantly better than the single-factor model (χ² difference test p = 0.0007), but the improvement in fit was small—for example, a difference of only 0.002 in the comparative fit index. This echoes earlier work by Elhai and colleagues in 2025, which had found more robust incremental fit for the two-factor structure across American and Italian samples.

The central finding concerned problematic smartphone use. Using Wald chi-square tests, the researchers found that PSU severity correlated more strongly with FOMO’s connection desire factor (r = 0.600) than with its apprehension factor (r = 0.493), a statistically significant difference (p = 0.009). This replicated the earlier 2025 findings and supports the theoretical prediction that the behavioral, safety-behavior-like dimension of FOMO is the one most tightly bound to compulsive phone use. Problematic social media use, however, told a different story: it was equally related to both dimensions (r = 0.552 for apprehension; r = 0.600 for connection desire; p = 0.122), a departure from the earlier work that had found connection desire more strongly tied to PSMU as well.

The authors offer a possible explanation for this divergence that hinges on the device itself. Problematic smartphone use, by definition, involves the smartphone, a device uniquely characterized by instant push notifications—often social in nature—that interrupt daily activities and lure users back to their screens. Recent findings suggest FOMO may serve as a mechanism linking notification receipt to smartphone addiction, potentially creating a feedback loop in which connection desire drives smartphone use, which in turn intensifies FOMO. Consistent with this, participants in the current study reported especially high use of mobile-first platforms built around frequent social updates and push notifications: 93% used Instagram, 83% Snapchat, and 74% TikTok. The authors caution, however, that this platform interpretation is descriptive and exploratory, and that the data cannot establish causality.

Equally striking is what the study did not find. Despite the apprehension dimension’s explicitly cognitive and emotional character—which might suggest a special affinity with negative affect—both FOMO dimensions correlated equally with depression (r = 0.455 vs. 0.408), anxiety (r = 0.527 vs. 0.517), brooding rumination (r = 0.503 vs. 0.453), and distress intolerance (r = 0.497 vs. 0.537), with all Wald tests far from significance. By extending the equal-relationship pattern beyond depression and anxiety to rumination and distress tolerance, the study corroborates and broadens the earlier work of Elhai, Casale, and Bond. The authors suggest that apprehension and connection desire may function as cognitive/emotional and behavioral markers, respectively, of a broader negative affectivity dimension—a view consistent with prior research showing that people high in FOMO experienced greater stress and negative emotion during a real-world social media outage.

That outage finding is worth underscoring, because it offers rare real-world evidence rather than laboratory simulation. When platforms go dark, individuals high in FOMO cannot simply check more often to soothe their worry, and their distress spikes accordingly. Such results imply that the emotional core of FOMO is not incidental to its behavioral expression but inseparable from it—precisely the pattern the equal correlations with negative affectivity suggest.

The findings are framed within two theoretical traditions. Self-determination theory conceptualizes FOMO as arising from unmet social relatedness needs, with problematic internet use serving as a maladaptive attempt to satisfy belonging. The Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution model, meanwhile, positions internet-related cognitions like FOMO as risk factors for problematic use, and predicts that the specific technology overused will reflect the nature of the underlying cognition—here, the socially driven connection desire aligning with the notification-saturated smartphone. The authors also note that severe negative affectivity is probably a risk factor for FOMO rather than the reverse, though bidirectional relations are likely, and short-term studies have shown FOMO prospectively driving negative mood.

The study carries important limitations. Its cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, and the authors call for longitudinal and experience-sampling research. The sample—Midwestern US undergraduates in introductory psychology—limits generalizability to other ages, cultures, and settings. All measures were self-report, with no structured diagnostic interviews and no objective smartphone or social media usage data. The two-factor FOMO model showed only minimal fit improvement over the single-factor model, and the connection desire subscale’s low internal consistency complicates interpretation. The team also modified the time-frames of several instruments—the BSMAS and DASS-21 among them—to maintain consistency across measures. Still, the data, survey protocol, and analysis code are publicly available in a Mendeley repository, supporting transparency and replication.

The broader implications are twofold. Clinically and conceptually, the results suggest that experiencing FOMO may have less to do with genuine social deficits and more to do with an underlying emotional vulnerability that saturates both of its dimensions. Practically, they point toward the design of interventions: if constant connection desire is the facet most implicated in problematic smartphone use, efforts to reduce compulsive phone behavior—such as managing notification exposure—may need to target the behavioral checking loop specifically, rather than the anxious apprehension that accompanies it. As smartphone notifications continue to fragment attention across mobile-first platforms, understanding which face of FOMO drives which behavior may prove essential to addressing problematic technology use at its roots.