Abstract
People are often categorized by age number as being young or old, and older adults are often discriminated because of the decline in their cognitive ability and everyday-life performance. Contrary to this traditional categorization, this study investigates an alternative view of ageing which argues that ageing is a continuous process, and examines whether other factors including stress, sleep habit, education, and working memory capacity are responsible for the inefficiency of cognitive and verbal performance. From a working memory test, it was found that age was a predictor for the decline in working memory capacity. On top of that, stress interacted with age resulting in an adverse effect on older adults’ working memory capacity. To test whether cognitive deterioration resulted from age affects verbal performance, an everyday-life activity shared by the majority of people, and whether each individual factor could directly affect verbal performance, a picture naming task and a storytelling task were conducted. From these verbal assessment tasks, it was clear that disfluency increased as the number of age increased. Moreover, regardless of age individuals with lower working memory capacity were found be more disfluent, and there was a small sign of negative effect of longer hours of sleep on verbal fluency. Taken all the results together, the study supports the view that ageing is a continuous process that occurs in everyone’s life. Moreover, it is not age alone that contributes to cognitive and verbal performance deterioration, and therefore, stigma attached to older adults should be reconsidered.
Presenters
Teeranoot SiriwittayakornAssistant Professor, English, Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand Thanasak Sirikanerat
Lecturer, Linguistics, Kasetsart University, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon [Bangkok], Thailand
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Social and Cultural Perspectives on Aging
KEYWORDS
AGE STIGMA, WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY, DISFLUENCY, STRESS, SLEEP HABIT
