There is a familiar story told about the rare 85-year-old with a memory like someone half their age: they must be unusually disciplined, or unusually content, or driven by some deep sense of purpose that keeps their mind from slipping. Researchers at Northwestern University’s Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease, led by Emily Rogalski, have spent years studying exactly this group, people they call SuperAgers, defined as adults 80 and older whose episodic memory, the ability to recall everyday events and personal experiences, tests as good as people 20 to 30 years younger. The research is not anecdotal. Brain imaging of SuperAgers shows they resist the cortical thinning that typically comes with age, and a 2026 study examining donated SuperAger brains, led by University of Illinois Chicago scientists working with the Northwestern program, found their hippocampi generate roughly twice as many new neurons as those of typically aging peers.
Given all that, it would be reasonable to expect SuperAgers to also stand out psychologically, to score higher on the kinds of measures researchers use to capture a person’s overall sense of well-being. A 2017 study by Anne Cook Maher and colleagues at Northwestern, published in PLoS ONE, tested that expectation directly. The researchers gave both SuperAgers and a comparison group of cognitively typical adults the same age a well-established 42-item questionnaire measuring six separate dimensions of psychological well-being: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, purpose in life, self-acceptance, and positive relations with others. If SuperAgers really did have some general psychological edge, keeping any one measure that broad and multidimensional should have shown it.
It didn’t, mostly. On five of the six dimensions, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, purpose in life, and self-acceptance, the two groups scored statistically the same. SuperAgers were not more autonomous, more purposeful, or more self-accepting than their typically aging peers by this measure. The one dimension where a real, statistically significant difference showed up was positive relations with others, the measure capturing how warm, trusting, and satisfying a person’s close relationships are. SuperAgers scored meaningfully higher on this single dimension than the comparison group did, while landing in the same range on everything else the questionnaire measured.
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It’s worth being precise about what a finding like this can and cannot show. The study is correlational, a snapshot comparison between two groups at one point in time, not an experiment that assigned people better relationships and then watched their memory scores change. That leaves the direction of the relationship genuinely open. It’s possible that having close, satisfying relationships helps protect memory as people age, through mechanisms like reduced stress or more cognitive and social stimulation. It’s also possible the causation runs the other way, that people whose memory stays sharp find it easier to sustain the kind of deep, ongoing relationships the questionnaire was measuring, since remembering shared history is part of what keeps a relationship feeling substantial. Both directions, or some mix of the two reinforcing each other over decades, are consistent with what this particular study found.
The result also lines up with a broader body of research connecting social isolation to worse cognitive outcomes in older adults generally, though that wider literature has the same causal ambiguity as the SuperAger study itself: isolation and cognitive decline are consistently linked in observational research, without the underlying mechanism being fully settled. What the SuperAger comparison adds is specificity. Rather than a general finding that isolated older adults tend to do worse, it points to relationship quality showing up as the one measurable difference between a group with exceptional memory and a group with ordinary memory for their age, once every other plausible psychological advantage had been checked and came back equal.
The finding was notable enough that it helped shape where the research has gone since. In 2021, the National Institute on Aging and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation awarded Rogalski’s team a $20 million grant to expand the SuperAging Program into a nationa