A Positive Outlook on Life Helps with Better Cognitive Function

Akshay Naik 06 November 2020

When you have a positive outlook on life, there is a lower chance that you would experience cognitive decline in your older years, a new study has found.

Published in the journal Psychological Science, the study reports that people who feel enthusiastic and cheerful, what psychologists call having ‘positive affect’, are less likely to experience memory decline as they age. These findings add to a growing body of research on positive affects’ role in healthy ageing.

To arrive at this conclusion, the research team from Northwestern University considered a large data set drawn from 991 middle-aged and older US adults who were members of a US-based national study. For this study, specific data points were selected across three time periods: 1995 to 1996, 2004 to 2006 and 2013 to 2014.

At each time point, the participants were asked to assess themselves in terms of a set of positive emotions. The emotional responses were drawn from different things that each person had experienced over the most recent 30-day period. For the last two assessments, each individual was asked to undertake different tests into memory performance. These tests required the participants to recall an array of words immediately after an instructor had presented them and also after 15 minutes had elapsed.

The large amount of data across the two-decade period enabled researchers to explore the association between having a positive outlook and any signs of memory decline among the participants. During the analysis, the data was normalised to take into account factors of age, gender, education, depression, negative affect and extraversion.

The results indicated that memory declined in participants who generally did not have a positive outlook, while it was observed to have a slower rate of decline in participants who had a more positive outlook on life. This higher rate of cognition was observed to be consistent over a period of 10 years.

"Our findings showed that memory declined with age," said Prof Claudia Haase, one of the researchers from Northwestern University. "However, individuals with higher levels of positive affect had a less steep memory decline over the course of almost a decade," added Dr Emily Hittner, of Northwestern University and the study’s lead author.

The researchers are hoping to take these findings forward for a further study to understand the pathways that could connect positive affect and memory, such as physical health or social relationships.

Comments