With the growing years, the senile section of society is exposed to multiple stressors encompassing; decease of dear ones, dysfunctional mobility, financial dependence, dependence for survival, numerous and chronic illnesses conditions [1–3] Additionally, the perceived lack of ability, fear of gradual degradation of the physical self, and the feeling of loneliness induce fear and anxiety. The negative perception of aging leads to enhanced levels of anxiety, which is termed as anxiety of aging [4, 5].
The anxiety of aging refers to worrying about the capacity to maintain sound health [6, 7] expressed that aging anxiety has fundamental dimensions such as psychological, social, physical, and transpersonal or spirituality. As a result, understanding how the anxiety of aging can influence behavior and interaction would be a critical research question.
Several factors can influence the anxiety of aging. The anxiety of aging denotes anxiety about growing old, probably influenced by culture, gender, age, and socioeconomic status [8]. Studies have demonstrated that individuals have varied perceptions of levels of aging anxiety, such as low negative anxiety and very high levels [9]. Individuals suffering from anxiety of aging have little tendency to socialize with other older adults [9]. Some studies have shown that the anxiety of aging is more reflective in middle age and younger people rather than older adults [10]. Results might be accurate in general. However, physical, mental, and social alterations would make older people more dependent, consequently leading to higher levels of anxiety of aging among older adults.
Related psychological issues of older adults might lead to numerous psychopathologies such as depression, cognitive impairment and/or death [11], lower life satisfaction and marital satisfaction [12].
Since anxiety is a critical issue, it is necessary to focus on designing relevant interventions to reduce anxiety to foster the quality of life. Therefore, valid and reliable tools are required to investigate the anxiety of aging and potential factors escalating it, especially among the aging population. Most of the scales evaluating anxiety of aging are uni-dimensional, and the item factor loadings are generally small [13, 14]. However, concrete diagnoses of the anxiety of aging require several components to be considered, and the scale must be multi-dimensional. The uni-dimensional scales suffer from the limitations of [7]. It seems, one of the common multi-dimensional scales that is used to assess anxiety of aging is Lasher’s Anxiety about Aging Scale [AAS] was developed by Lasher and Faulkender in1993 [7].
Since Lasher’s AAS or similar tools have not been psychometrically adapted for people who are Persian or talk in Farsi language; Therefore psychometric evaluation of this tools can be classified as five reasons for conducting: 1) psychometric an appropriate tool for assessing the anxiety of the older adults 2) Designing interventions to reduce the anxiety of aging after evaluating the anxiety about aging in the diagnostic evaluation phase 3) Investigating Factors affecting on aging anxiety of older adults 4) Investigating the effect of the gender and age pattern of aging anxiety across the life among the older adults, and finally, 5) Assessing the concurrent validity of AAS.