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Testing bidirectionality in associations of awareness of age-related gains and losses with physical, mental, and cognitive functioning across one year: The role of age
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The bidirectionality between self-perceptions of aging and health-related outcomes may depend on age group. Therefore, we tested such bidirectionality among individuals in late midlife (50-64 years), young-old age (65-74 years), and old-old age (75+ years), taking advantage of the construct of awareness of age-related change (AARC) and its 2-dimensionality in terms of AARC-gains and AARC-losses. Various conceptualizations of physical, mental, and cognitive functioning were used as outcomes. METHODS: Data from two measurement occasions (2019; 2020) from the UK PROTECT study for individuals in late midlife (N = 2,385), young-old age (N = 2,430), and old-old age (N = 539) were used. Data on self-reported functional difficulties, depression, anxiety, and performance on four computerized cognitive tasks (i.e., verbal reasoning, paired associate learning, self-ordered search, and digit span) providing a score for verbal reasoning and a score for working memory were analyzed using cross-lagged panel models. RESULTS: Across all three age groups the bidirectional associations of AARC-gains with indicators of functioning were not significant, whereas higher AARC-losses significantly predicted slightly greater functional difficulties and higher depression and anxiety levels. Higher AARC-losses predicted slightly poorer Verbal Reasoning only in old-old age and poorer Working Memory predicted slightly higher AARC-losses only in young-old age. The remaining associations of AARC-losses with cognitive tasks were not statistically significant. DISCUSSION: In accordance with previous research targeting other indicators of self-perceptions of aging, this study supported a stronger impact of AARC-losses on indicators of physical functioning and mental health than vice versa from midlife to old-old age.
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Date
2023
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Article
Subject
Cognition, Mental health
Citation
Sabatini, S., Wahl, H. W., Diehl, M., Clare, L., Ballard, C., Brooker, H., Corbett, A., Hampshire, A. & Stephan, B. C. M. (2023). Testing bidirectionality in associations of awareness of age-related gains and losses with physical, mental, and cognitive functioning across one year: The role of age. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbad150.
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© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.