This application is made by Allyson Washburn, Ph.D., a new investigator in the field of aging, in response to research topic #13: Social psychology of aging. The proposed pilot work is preliminary to a longitudinal study of the relationships among social behavior, social cognition, and general cognitive status in dementia patients and in a group of controls matched for age, gender, and educational level. The larger study will examine changes in social-cognitive functioning associated with cognitive decline, as well as the functional significance of these changes, i.e., what changes in social behavior are associated with what changes in social cognition. A principal aim is to better understand the social sequelae of dementing illnesses and to develop interventions for promoting optimal social functioning.
Aims of more theoretical interest are to examine the functional structure of the component process of social cognition and to determine the relative contributions of social and non-social cognition in explain social behavior.
The specific aims of the proposed pilot work are: 1) To test the feasibility of direct observation methods for assessing social behavior in nursing home residents with and without dementia; and 2) Using existing experimental tasks and paradigms, to develop and field test a batter of measures for assessing the social cognitive skills underlying social behavior in this population. The goals are, first, to determine whether social behavior in the frail elderly can be feasibly and reliably assessed in natural settings; and second, to examine the psychometric properties of measures of social cognition in this population. Additional aims are: 3) to describe social behavior and social cognition in nursing home residents with and without dementia and to characterize differences between the groups; and 4) To generate hypotheses for testing in the larger, longitudinal study. The social cognition measures assess the following: face processing, affect recognition, person perception, representations of social situations, empathy, and interpersonal problem-solving. During Phase I, the social cognition tasks will be piloted with six individuals to determine what changes are needed to increase ease of administration and face validity. This battery will be field-tested during Phase II with 60 residents from two nursing homes. Test-retest and inter-rater reliabilities, as appropriate, will be computed for the individual social cognition measures. Social behavior on the nursing unit will also be assessed during Phase II using survey and direct observation methods. Inter-rater reliability will be computed for the latter. Differences among cognitively intact and mildly to moderately demented participants will be examined using repeated measures MANOVA models.
| Washburn, Allyson M; Sands, Laura P (2006) Social cognition in nursing home residents with and without cognitive impairment. J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci 61:P174-9 |
