Effects of a comprehensive educational group intervention in older women with cognitive complaints: A randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Objective: This study presents a new comprehensive educational group intervention that offers psycho-education about cognitive aging and contextual factors (i.e., negative age stereotypes, beliefs, health, and lifestyle), focuses on skills and compensatory behavior, and incorporates group discussion. Its effects were investigated in community-dwelling older women who report normal age-related cognitive complaints.

Methods: A randomized controlled trial with an experimental and waiting-list control condition was carried out in a sample of 50 women aged 60–75 years. As the main problem of these individuals were perceived cognitive deficits without actual cognitive decrements, metacognition served as the primary outcome measure. Objective cognitive functioning and psychological well-being were secondary outcome measures. A double baseline and a follow-up assessment were carried out.

Results: Participants in the experimental condition reported significantly fewer negative emotional reactions toward cognitive functioning (U = 164.500, p = 0.004). The reported effect size (δ = −0.473) could be interpreted as large.

Conclusions: This new comprehensive educational group intervention reduces negative emotional reactions toward cognitive functioning, which seems a prerequisite for improved subjective cognitive functioning and well-being. It can potentially contribute the well-being of an important and large group of older adults.

Keywords:

• cognitive aging
• subjective forgetfulness
• metacognition
• intervention
• outcome

Acknowledgments

There are no conflicts of interest affecting this manuscript. The authors thank Esther Steins and Climmy van den Nieuwenhof for their help in implementing the intervention. The assistance of Sil Aarts, Annette Joosten and Annelies Wouters in collecting the data has been highly appreciated.

Notes

Note

1. Note that a more extensive overview of traditional cognitive interventions and multidimensional approaches, as well as a detailed description of the intervention's background, content and process evaluation are provided in Hoogenhout et al. (2011).