Age Stereotype Priming and Social Participation (ASPSP)

Memory performance is shown to be affected by age stereotypes among older adults. The purpose of the study is to examine the effects of age stereotype primes on episodic memory using priming intervention. The moderating effects of social participation is also examined.

All participants are community-dwelling older adults residing in Hong Kong. They are invited to review their social participation profile and given a brief psycho-education about memory. They are then randomly allocated to one of the two following conditions. Participants are primed either with age stereotypes or non-age stereotypes words by implicit priming intervention in the context of a reaction task prior to the episodic memory tasks. Other measures such as demographic variables and social participation rate are collected by questionnaire during the delayed recall interval.

Participants received a review of the profile of their social participation. They also received psycho-education about memory components. They were give given memory tests with age-related primes.

Participants received a review of the profile of their social participation. They also received psycho-education about memory components. They were give given memory tests with NON age-related primes.

The priming intervention was performed using the E-prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA). To ensure the primes flashed on screen were beyond awareness, the similar adjustment procedure was taken (see Levy, 1996; Stein et al., 2002). After the trial block, participants were asked to try to report any words viewed during each trial. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) will be reduced or enhanced whenever 2 words or above were correctly reported or no single word could be reported respectively. The priming SOA for this study ranged from 32 ms to 208 ms (M = 98.70 ms. SD = 48.60).

he priming intervention was performed using the E-prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA). To ensure the primes flashed on screen were beyond awareness, the similar adjustment procedure was taken (see Levy, 1996; Stein et al., 2002). After the trial block, participants were asked to try to report any words viewed during each trial. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) will be reduced or enhanced whenever 2 words or above were correctly reported or no single word could be reported respectively. The priming SOA for this study ranged from 32 ms to 208 ms (M = 98.70 ms. SD = 48.60).

The Hong Kong List Learning is a validated tool for assessing episodic memory for aged Chinese speaking adults (Chan, 2006). It was further taken for investigating differences among older adults with normal cognitive ability and older adults with mild cognitive impairment (Yeung et al., 2016). The random control list was taken in this study. It comprises 16 words formed by four categories:

Inclusion Criteria: Indication of largely normal cognitive functioning as screened on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) with Hong Kong norms - Exclusion Criteria: Sensory deficits and evidence of cognitive impairment as screened on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) with Hong Kong norms -

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Chan SCY, Au AML, Lai SMK. The detrimental impacts of negative age stereotypes on the episodic memory of older adults: does social participation moderate the effects? BMC Geriatr. 2020 Nov 5;20(1):452. doi: 10.1186/s12877-020-01833-z.