Developmental Psychologist Katie Cherry was studying longevity and successful aging among older adults when Hurricane Karina hit in 2005, destroying the Gulf Coast and leaving most of south Louisiana living in a disaster zone.
“In 2005, I was in the middle of a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary National Institutes of Health program project grant to study healthy aging study in nonagenarians,” she said. “My collaborators from New Orleans had all evacuated and I was the only researcher on the team whose university was not closed by the storm, so it was up to me carry out a hurricane assessment to determine whether our study sample was compromised. It was then I realized there wasn’t much science about how older adults are affected by severe weather events.”
Since that time, Cherry has taken the opportunity to pivot her research program to investigate how adults cope with the stress of disasters. Cherry has also studied how older adults coped with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and the catastrophic flooding in Louisiana in 2016. Her current research is measuring symptoms of depression and anxiety among older adults who experienced flooding and more recent natural disasters, including Hurricanes Laura in 2020 and Ida in 2021.
“During a severe weather event, the mortality rate for older adults is higher, yes, but that doesn’t mean they are all frail or vulnerable,” Cherry said. “In fact, many are incredibly resilient, take things in stride, and are optimistic in ways that other people are not.”
Cherry’s work takes a careful look at how experiencing a natural disaster affects older people, and how they respond to these events. “We have found, that older people are less likely to experience symptoms of depression and more likely to score better on mental health assessments,” she said.
For example, immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Cherry’s research team documented an initial dip in working memory among middle-aged adults. “But we saw that working memory return to normal functioning within two years,” she said. Other evidence in the hurricane assessment indicated that the nonagenarians were no different across many health indicators than they had been in the months before Katrina hit.
“Essentially, our early work demonstrated our nonagenarian survivors were just fine,” she said. “In fact, some of them participated in the relief efforts coordinated by local churches and faith-based communities in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Many of them also opened their homes to displaced friends and family from the coastal parishes who lost their homes in Katrina.”
The resilience Cherry observed is consistent with the inoculation hypothesis, which states that living through stressful situations equips one to better deal with stress in the future. “The idea is that older people’s initial emotional responses are diminished because they have experience with other disasters in their lives,” she said. “Maybe they’ve developed more mature or effective coping strategies, or it could be that they have more realistic expectations for what life is like after a disaster.”
Cherry also studies psychosocial factors that lead to positive outcomes among disaster survivors. “We have found that having a social support network and institutional religiosity – meaning participating in an organized congregation – has a protective effect on mental health,” she explained.
“Interestingly, non-organizational religiosity – people who are reading a lot of religious literature, praying, and who are trying to create religiosity in their own way – were more likely to report elevated symptoms of post-traumatic stress five to seven years after Katrina,” she said. “We don’t exactly know why, but it could be that people are trying to relieve their stress through religious activity, although the symptoms of post-traumatic stress remain, indicating that the need for support services continues long after a destructive hurricane had happened.”
Cherry’s research holds several take-away messages. “First, we know the needs of survivors linger long after the immediate disaster is over, maybe even years later,” she said. “Second, we absolutely need to provide more mental health services for people who have lost their homes and communities after a severe weather event.
“Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, if I had to boil down the last 17 years of my work, it comes down to this: We’ve seen again and again that older people are much more resilient and faring much better than we would expect them to be.”