Does practising Tai Chi make older adults happier, and why?
Older adults who did eight weeks of Tai Chi reported more confidence in managing their emotions and higher wellbeing than a control group, and part of the wellbeing gain ran through that emotional confidence.
Source
The impact of Tai Chi on emotional regulation efficacy and subjective wellbeing in the elderly and the mediating mechanism
Study at a glance
- Design
- RCT — Two-arm randomised trial: 8 weeks of supervised 24-form Tai Chi (five 30-min sessions a week) versus a control group keeping usual routines; pre/post self-report with blinded assessors.
- N
- N=60 · 60 healthy adults aged 60+ randomised, 30 per group; no dropouts reported.
- Population
- Healthy community-dwelling older adults in Zhengzhou, China
- Outcome
- Emotional regulation efficacy, positive affect, negative affect and total subjective wellbeing (self-report scales)
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Sixty healthy adults aged 60 or over were randomly split into a Tai Chi group and a control group of 30 each. The Tai Chi group practised a simplified 24-form routine five times a week for 30 minutes over 8 weeks with an instructor, while controls kept their usual lives. Both groups filled in questionnaires on emotional regulation efficacy (belief in one's ability to manage emotions) and subjective wellbeing before and after, and a mediation analysis asked whether change in regulation efficacy explained change in wellbeing.
What they found
The control group showed no significant changes, whereas the Tai Chi group improved on all measures. After the programme the Tai Chi group scored higher than controls on emotional regulation efficacy, positive affect, the negative-affect scale and overall wellbeing, with medium-to-large effect sizes. Change in regulation efficacy accounted for about a fifth of the effect on negative affect and about a sixth of the effect on total wellbeing, but did not mediate the effect on positive affect.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The sample was small and came from community centres in one city, so it may not represent older adults generally. The control group did no alternative activity, so benefits could come from social contact, attention or general exercise rather than Tai Chi specifically, and all outcomes were self-reported by people who knew whether they were practising. There was no follow-up beyond 8 weeks, lifestyle factors were not monitored, and the mediation analysis uses change scores measured at the same time, so it cannot establish that efficacy changed first. The paper describes a rise in the negative-affect score as an improvement, which implies the scale is reverse-scored, but this is not stated clearly.
Key terms
- Emotional regulation efficacy
- A person's confidence in their ability to manage and recover from their emotions.
- Subjective wellbeing
- How good people feel about their lives, combining positive feelings, low negative feelings and satisfaction.
- Mediation analysis
- A test of whether an intervention works partly through changing an intermediate variable, which then changes the outcome.
- Randomisation
- Assigning participants to groups by chance so that groups are similar before the intervention.
- Cohen's d
- An effect size giving the difference between means in standard-deviation units; larger values mean bigger effects.
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Quiz yourself
What was the design of this study?
Common questions
Is this evidence that Tai Chi itself is special?
Not yet: controls did nothing, so any structured group exercise with an instructor might produce similar gains.
What does it mean that efficacy mediated part of the effect?
Some of the wellbeing boost went along with people feeling more able to handle emotions, but most of the effect was direct or through other routes.
Were the assessors aware of group membership?
The authors say research assistants who ran assessments were blinded, but participants themselves knew and filled in the scales.
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