Loneliness and social isolation are not associated with executive functioning in a cross-sectional study of cognitively healthy older adults

ABSTRACT

The literature on the relationship between social interaction and executive functions (EF) in older age is mixed, perhaps stemming from differences in EF measures and the conceptualization/measurement of social interaction. We investigated the relationship between social interaction and EF in 102 cognitively unimpaired older adults (ages 65–90). Participants received an EF battery to measure working memory, inhibition, shifting, and global EF. We measured loneliness subjectively through survey and social isolation objectively through naturalistic observation. Loneliness was not significantly related to any EF measure (p-values = .13–.65), nor was social isolation (p-values = .11–.69). Bayes factors indicated moderate to extremely strong evidence (BF₀₁ = 8.70 to BF₀₁ = 119.49) in support of no relationship..   Overall, these findings suggest that, among cognitively healthy older adults, there may not be a robust cross-sectional relationship between EF and subjective loneliness or objective social isolation.

KEYWORDS:

• Loneliness
• social isolation
• executive functioning
• older adults
• cross-sectional

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) data are available upon request. The executive functioning data can be found here: https://osf.io/8hkjz/?view_only=55271cf10928417f8f03564e7f353bcb

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mind and Life Institute (2015-1440-Polsinelli).