An interesting research study in this month’s Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences looks at what people think about their mental abilities and how old they feel. Researchers Schaefer and Schippee at Purdue University asked people how they felt about their thinking and memory as they got older with questions like “As I get older, my mental sharpness is bound to get worse.” They also asked people in their study how old they actually felt.

Then they looked at how well these persons’ actual ages and how old they actually feel predicted what they thought about how their minds would work as they get older. For women, both their actual and their perceived ages predicted what they thought about how their mental abilities would change over time. For men, neither perceived nor actual age made a difference, but their physical health did. Men who said their physical health was worse were also more pessimistic about their mental abilities.

For both groups, mood and self-efficacy were significantly related to what they thought about their mental abilities over time. This once again emphasizes how important mood and a feeling of being able to control things is for how you feel about your brain’s functioning.

The authors note that their results may have been affected by their sample size, but they raise the possibility that men and women may view their mental abilities differently as they get older. Women’s perceptions of their age seem more important for how they feel about their mental aging, while for men their physical health might be an index of how they view it. For both groups, self-efficacy and mood are important.

Reference:

Schafer MK, Shippee TP. (2010). Age identity, gender, and perceptions of decline: Does feeling older lead to pessimistic dispositions about cognitive aging? Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 65B(1), 91-96.

The members of the class are interested in my presentation, and we’ve done several exercises to help them learn more about what they can do to maintain and improve their memory.

Nothing is more helpful than understanding how your memory works, and probably the most critical issue for older persons and their memory is attention. Although it’s obvious (once you think about it), if you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t remember it.

Even the most commons memory complaints I hear from patients are often related to memory. The number one complaint is “I went in to another room to get something and forgot why I was there.” Whenever I mention this, I see lots of nods of recognition in the audience.

For many people, this issue is caused by failing to maintain attention on a specific task. While you’re going to the other room, your mind moves on to another topic (maybe you notice something else you’ve been meaning to do). By the time you get to the other room, you’ve lost the task you were thinking about in the first place.

The solution is to maintain focus on what you want to do, at least until you’ve been able to encode the task in your memory. This means keeping the task in mind while you go to the other room or rehearsing it several times before you move to the new room.

When we’re younger, we can depend on some things in our memory working automatically. As we get older, things that used to work automatically may require a little extra attention. Often, it’s not your memory that isn’t working, it’s how you’re paying attention.

I had anticipated strong interest in the class, but not as much as we actually had. I had thought perhaps 15-20 people would come to the class the first day, but 60 persons came the first day. As part of their participation, I asked students to complete several questionnaires about how they felt about their memory abilities as well as administered a short memory test. We did the same measures at the end of the class.

A striking finding in previous research is that memory self-efficacy is strongly related to actually memory abilities. This term refers to the extent to which you believe you have control over how your memory works and can cope with challenges. Sure enough, in our Osher class, we found that students’ memory self-efficacy was related to how well they performed on a memory class. That leaves two possibilities: people who have good memories have high levels of memory self-efficacy, or that people with high levels of self-efficacy have good memories.

Which is it? Other studies have shown that people with higher levels of self-efficacy respond better to memory training. I think the chances are that the answer to the question is one or the other, but both. Having memory problems may make you feel less well able to control your memory, but feeling as though you understand and control your memory may make you better able to cope with challenges to your memory.

How can you improve your memory self-efficacy? The short answer is to learn more about how your memory works and develop realistic expectations for yourself about how your memory should work. I like a book called The Memory Workbook by DJ Mason, ML Kohn, and KA Clark (New Harbinger, 2001). The participants in our memory class really liked it, and it includes a number of exercises that you can work through on your own.