Educational Mobility Through Marriage and Risk of Cognitive Impairment in Late Life

Abstract Objectives: Marriage represents a long-term intimate relationship involving high levels of interaction and shared resources. Education, as an inter-individual resource, may influence the health status of an individual and his/her spouse. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of educational mobility through marriage on the risk of cognitive impairment in older adults. Methods: Data were derived from the 2014 wave of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey. The final sample included 1,396 married men and 671 married women aged 65 years and older. Cognitive impairment was assessed using the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE). The gender-specific effect of educational mobility on the risk of cognitive impairment was tested by logistic regression analyses. Results: Older men who experienced downward educational mobility through marriage had a higher risk of cognitive impairment, when compared to their upwardly mobile counterparts. This association was not observed in women. Having more years of schooling protected both men and women from being cognitive impaired in late life. Discussion: These findings provide further evidence that downward socioeconomic mobility through marriage is associated with adverse health outcomes. Yet, the impact of spousal education on health must be understood through the lens of gender. Potential mechanisms that may link spousal education to cognition over the life course were discussed, including health literacy, health behaviors, and household resources.

Chronic stress has been associated with several adverse cognitive outcomes, including impaired judgement, executive functioning, and memory.Chronic stress has also been linked to several neurological conditions, including Dementia and Alzheimer's.While several biomedical measures of stress exist, stress is often subjective, and research has shown that the ability to cope with stress-known as stress reactivity-is more indicative of stress burden that the actual stressor itself.As such, this study aimed to identify the association between different patterns of stress and cognition among older adults.Data were derived from the 2016 Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative study of older adults aged 50 and older living in the United States.Latent class analysis was used to identify different classes of stress and hierarchical linear regressions were conduced to identify the associations between identified stress classes and cognition.The latent class analysis resulted in four stress classes: high stress, financial stress, secondary stress, and low stress.The sequential logistic regression models revealed that while high stress and financial stress classes resulted in cognitive decline, the significance was mitigated after controlling for health and body functioning factors.This suggests that older adults are experiencing stressors mostly from health impairments and interventions should target improved health management and financial support for health conditions as an indirect way of reducing disparities in cognitive functioning resulting from chronic stress.

DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS MODERATE THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN LIFETIME DISCRIMINATION AND INHIBITION AMONG OLDER ADULTS
Regina Wright, 1 and Desiree Bygrave, 2 1.University of Delaware, University of Deleware, Delaware, United States,2. Benedict College,Benedict College,South Carolina,United States Discrimination has been identified as a potentially modifiable environmental stressor that reduces cognitive function.As the burden of discrimination can extend from early to late life, understanding its role in cognition in late life is critical.Further, understanding the potential moderating influence of depressive symptoms, which are common among older adults, on the linkage between discrimination and cognition, may provide further insight into the potential patterns of psychosocial stress and negative affect that may promote cognitive decline and dementia.Thus, we sought to examine whether depressive symptoms moderate linear relations of lifetime discrimination to cognitive function in the domains of visuospatial, verbal, and working memory, executive function, and psychomotor ability, adjusting for age, sex, race, and education.Participants were 165 older adults (34% male) with a mean age of 68.43y.Participants completed a health screening, a battery of cognitive tests, a psychosocial assessment, and cardiovascular testing relevant to the larger study.Linear regression results showed a significant interaction between lifetime discrimination and depressive symptoms (p<.05) related to the Stroop interference score, a measure of inhibition.A probe of the interaction showed that greater lifetime discrimination was associated with better inhibition among participants with fewer depressive symptoms.This paradoxical finding is consistent with scant research that shows exposure to discrimination may heighten performance, and is more common among individuals that have achieved more, both educationally and vocationally.Greater depressive symptomatology may reduce this paradoxical association.Future research should explore this question both longitudinally and in a larger sample.Grace Caskie, 1 and Abigail Voelkner, 2 1. Lehigh University,  Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States, 2

. Lehigh University, Easton, Pennsylvania, United States
Paper-and-pencil measures of inductive reasoning and verbal memory administered in-person are well-established methods for measuring cognitive ability in adults.However, given recent increases in the use of online surveys, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic when in-person research with older adults became difficult, we investigated whether these cognitive measures could be administered effectively online and whether older adults' performance on these measures of inductive reasoning and verbal memory might differ by education level.Data were collected online between mid-May and mid-June of 2020 from 292 individuals aged 66-90 years (M=69.1,SD=3.3).The sample was primarily White (91%) and had more women (62%) than men; 83 participants had a graduate-level education (master's/doctoral degree), 101 had an associate's or bachelor's degree, and 108 had less than an associate's degree.Three measures of inductive reasoning (Number Series, Letter Sets, and Word Series) and two measures of verbal memory (Immediate Recall and Delayed Recall of a list of 20 words) were completed by participants on an online platform.One-way MANOVA found a significant main effect for education group on the inductive reasoning measures (Wilks' lambda=.93,p=.001).However, follow-up univariate ANOVAs indicated significant differences by education group only for Number Series, with Tukey post hoc tests showing that the graduate-level and college-degree groups performed significantly better than the group with less than an associate's degree.Factorial repeated-measures ANOVA found a significant decline between immediate and delayed recall (p<.001) and that this difference varied by education group (p=.003).Implications of these findings will be discussed.

EDUCATIONAL MOBILITY THROUGH MARRIAGE AND RISK OF COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT IN LATE LIFE Rong Fu, Siena College, Loudonville, New York, United States
Objectives: Marriage represents a long-term intimate relationship involving high levels of interaction and shared resources.Education, as an inter-individual resource, may influence the health status of an individual and his/her spouse.The aim of this study was to assess the impact of educational mobility through marriage on the risk of cognitive impairment in older adults.Methods: Data were derived from the 2014 wave of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey.The final sample included 1,396 married men and 671 married women aged 65 years and older.Cognitive impairment was assessed using the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE).The gender-specific effect of educational mobility on the risk of cognitive impairment was tested by logistic regression analyses.Results: Older men who experienced downward educational mobility through marriage had a higher risk of cognitive impairment, when compared to their upwardly mobile counterparts.This association was not observed in women.Having more years of schooling protected both men and women from being cognitive impaired in late life.Discussion: These findings provide further evidence that downward socioeconomic mobility through marriage is associated with adverse health outcomes.Yet, the impact of spousal education on health must be understood through the lens of gender.Potential mechanisms that may link spousal education to cognition over the life course were discussed, including health literacy, health behaviors, and household resources.

EVENT CENTRALITY OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES IN OLDER ADULTHOOD
Justina Pociunaite, and Tabea Wolf, Ulm University, Ulm, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany Centrality of an event (CE) is a characteristic denoting how important a life experience is to one's identity.Usually, positive memories are more central than negative ones in the community samples.Nevertheless, there is emerging evidence showing substantial individual differences in how one perceives CE.Especially regarding age, one could expect pronounced differences due to age-related changes in personal goals.In this study, we investigated how older adults differ from young and middle-aged adults.Apart from age, we tested whether personality traits such as neuroticism and openness to experience influence the CE ratings among age groups.The sample comprised of 363 German participants, age ranging from 18 to 89 (M=49.57,SD=17.087),67.2 % of the sample were women.Using multilevel analysis, we found the CE of positive memories to be higher in all age groups.The CE of positive events significantly differed for older adults compared to younger adults but not to the middle-aged group.With respect to personality, neuroticism had an impact only on the CE of negative memories in younger and middle-aged adults.For older adults, neither neuroticism, nor openness to experience had an impact on CE ratings.This shows that while older adults significantly differ from younger adults in the CE of positive memories, other individual differences characteristics do not have an impact on the way older adults perceive memories as central to their identity.

EVIDENCE FOR A SPECIFIC ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SUSTAINED ATTENTION AND GAIT SPEED IN MIDDLE-TO-OLDER-AGED ADULTS
Courtney Aul, 1 Hannah Park, 2 Joseph DeGutis, 3 On-Yee Lo, 4 Victoria Poole, 5 Jonathan Bean, 6 Elizabeth Leritz, 1 and Michael Esterman, 7 1.VA Boston Healthcare System,Boston,Massachusetts,United States,2. Brandeis University,Waltham,Massachusetts,United States,3. VA Boston Healthcare System/Harvard Medical School,Boston,Massachusetts,United States,4. Hebrew SeniorLife/Harvard Medical School,Boston,Massachusetts,United States,5.Rush University, Chicago, Illinois, United States,6. VA Boston Healthcare System,VA Boston Healthcare System,Massachusetts,United States,7. VA Boston Healthcare System/BU School of Medicine,Boston,Massachusetts,United States Although cognitive decline has previously been associated with mobility limitations and frailty, the relationship between sustained attention and gait speed is incompletely characterized.To better quantify the specificity of the sustained attention and gait speed association, we examined the extent to which this relationship is unique rather than accounted for by executive functioning and physical health characteristics.58 middle-to-older-aged community-dwelling adults without overt illness or diseases (45-90 years old, 21 females) participated in the study.Each participant completed a 4-meter gait speed assessment and validated neuropsychological tests to examine various domains of executive functions including working memory (i.e., Digit Span), inhibitory control (i.e., Stroop Color Word Test), and task switching (i.e., Trail Making Test).Multiple physical and vascular risk factors were also evaluated.Sustained attention was assessed using the gradual onset continuous performance task (gradCPT), a well validated go/no-go sustained attention task.A series of linear regression models were created to examine how different aspects of cognition, including sustained attention and traditional measures of executive functioning, related to gait speed while controlling for a variety of physical and vascular risk factors.Among all predictors, gradCPT accuracy explained the most variance in gait speed (R2 = 0.21, p < 0.001) and was the only significant predictor (β = 0.36, p = 0.01) when accounting for executive functioning and other physical and vascular risk factors.The present results indicate that sustained attention may be uniquely sensitive and mechanistically linked to mobility limitations in middleto-older adults.

EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING, EMOTION REGULATION, AND NEGATIVE EMOTION IN SUICIDAL OLDER ADULTS
Rachel Waldman, 1 Brian Liles, 2 Dimitris Kiosses, 3 and Richard Zweig, 4 1.Weill Cornell Medicine,New York,New York,United States,2. Weill Cornell Medicine,White Plains,New York,United States,White Plains,New York,United States,4. Yeshiva University,Bronx,New York,United States Deficits in executive functioning, emotion regulation, and negative emotion have all been linked to suicidality.Yet, the complex interactions between these three factors and their relationships to suicidal behavior in older adults remain unclear.Participants (N = 39) were depressed middle and older adult (M = 62.0, SD = 9.41) inpatients with recent suicidal attempt or ideation, without psychotic depression or moderate or greater cognitive impairment (DRS>90).Participants were administered measures of executive functioning (Stroop and COWAT), emotion regulation (ERQ Suppression and Reappraisal; RRS-Brooding; UPPS-Premediation Scale), and negative emotion (PANAS-X), in addition to measures of depression (MADRS) and suicidality (C-SSRS).Results indicated that executive functioning was not significantly related to emotion regulation or negative affect, but measures of emotion regulation were related to negative emotion and frequency of suicidal ideation in bivariate analyses.Lower