Collectivism Is Associated With Greater Neurocognitive Fluency in Older Adults

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of self-construal on neurocognitive functions in older adults. A total of 86 community-dwelling older adults 60 years and older were assessed with three common self-report measures of self-construal along individualism and collectivism (IC). A cognitive battery was administered to assess verbal and non-verbal fluency abilities. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to categorize individuals according to IC, and one-way analyses of covariance (ANCOVA), including relevant covariates (e.g., ethnicity, gender, linguistic abilities), were used to compare neurocognitive functions between individualists and collectivists. Collectivists outperformed individualists on left frontally-mediated measures of verbal fluency (action, phonemic) after controlling for relevant covariates, F(1,77) = 6.942, p = 0.010, η2 = 0.061. Groups did not differ on semantic fluency, non-verbal fluency, or attention/working memory (all ps > 0.05). These findings suggest a cognitive advantage in collectivists for verbal processing speed with an additional contribution of left frontal processes involved in lexicosemantic retrieval. Self-construal may provide a meaningful descriptor for diverse samples in neuropsychological research and may help explain other cross-cultural differences. Introduction As the population ages, cultural diversity continues to change and grow at both a nationwide and global scale. Cultural diversity relates to both int...
Source: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research