Sustain Seniors’ Memory with Self-Esteem

In our transactions with the elderly, we often find it useful to inquire about their past experiences. We’re calling on what cognitive psychologists refer to as the senior’s episodic memory and about which those psychologists distinguish between recall and recognition. In free recall tasks, an elderly adult might be asked, “What places did you visit last time you toured that city?” The corresponding cued recognition task would consist of asking, “From this list of places often visited in tours of that city, which ones did you previously see?”
     As we might expect, advanced age brings greater deficits, relative to younger adults’ memories, in recall than in recognition. In addition, a mix of anxiety and low self-esteem operate differently to impair the two types of episodic memory in the younger than in the older adults. Researchers at France’s University of Tours found that among those ages 20 to 40 years in their sample, anxiety and low self-esteem operated in tandem to cause impairments. The effect of self-esteem on memory performance could be explained by how low self-esteem increased anxiety. However, among those in the sample who were ages 60 to 80 and free of signs of physical brain impairment, the degree of self-esteem impaired episodic memory separately from the effect of anxiety on memory.
     The researchers attribute these findings to older adults having a pronounced sensitivity to self-esteem. Related to this, because thinking about our past experiences is central to our identity in the world, the senior’s recognition that recall is fading can itself disrupt self-esteem, creating a vicious circle with memory problems.
     Studies at Springfield College and University of Missouri acknowledged the reality that the elderly remember facts less well than do younger adults. Causes include deterioration in hearing and vision, less effective functioning of the brain at encoding and filtering information, reduced storage capacity in working memory, and slower retrieval. Then there’s that other cause, which is reversible: The senior citizen’s belief that senior citizens have poor memory. Society’s prevailing view of the elderly as highly forgetful itself leads to their poorer performance in recall. The stereotype becomes the reality.
     While compensating for increases in memory lapses, avoid aggravating the problem. When your shopper experiences a senior moment, be patient and move on. Because recognition memory persists better than recall memory over the years, use cues, such as with lists of alternatives which you present to the senior.

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