Aging in Asia Findings from New and Emerging Data Initiatives (2012) / Chapter Skim
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12 Effects of Social Activities on Cognitive Functions: Evidence from CHARLS--Yuqing Hu, Xiaoyan Lei, James P. Smith, and Yaohui Zhao
12 Effects of Social Activities on Cognitive Functions: Evidence from CHARLS--Yuqing Hu, Xiaoyan Lei, James P. Smith, and Yaohui Zhao
Pages 279-306
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. Cognitive function involves operations such as perception, memory, creation of imagery, and thinking, and it declines sharply as people approach advanced age (Levy, 1994; Tilvis et al., 2004)
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Such motivations further limit their ability to seek information as well as their attention, memory, and cognition processing. However, cognitively stimulating social activity is hypothesized to benefit cognitive functions by providing resistance to mental diseases, such as dementia, and by reducing rates of cognitive decline (Hsu, 2007; Wang et al., 2002)
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The following section shows the principal relationships between cognitive functions and social activities emerging from the CHARLS data. We then present OLS reduced form estimations showing the relationship between cognitive functions and community facilities.
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. Within each PSU, CHARLS randomly selected 25 dwellings in rural and 36 in urban areas from a com plete list of dwelling units generated from a mapping/listing operation.
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When relatives live far away, Mahjong helps form a sense of belonging by providing a chance to interact with those with whom one shares interests and personalities. The effort to win games -- remembering rules, learning skills, and observing and reacting to others' behavior -- forces the brain to work and is hypothesized to enhance people's cognitive functioning through such 3 Missing values of the control variables are imputed by multiple imputation method.
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Cognitive function of respondents is also measured in the "health status and function" module in the CHARLS questionnaire, which tests orientation, calculation, word recall, and other cognitive dimensions. Cognitive ability can be generally categorized into fluid cognitive ability (FCA)
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In this research, for simplicity, we classify cognitive abilities into two categories: mental intactness (MI) and episodic memory (EM)
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Please tell me any of the words that you remember now. NOTES: Scores have been adjusted so that higher values indicate better cognitive function Episodic memory is the mean of scores of immediate and delayed word recalls.
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Mental Intactness Episodic Memory
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. The latter is included since the possibility exists that some unobserved genetic factors systemat ically affect people's cognitive functions, and the number of big surnames may indicate relatives in the community with whom the respondent may interact so it may serve as a measure of social connectedness.
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The last four columns in Table 12-1 list social activity participation across four age groups. People become less engaged as they age, which may be partly due to declining health with age.7 However, there are two exceptions: participation rates for interacting with friends drop sharply between ages 50–60 (from 40 to 31.1%)
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of siblings 3.21 3.05 3.37 3.24 3.19 SES Education Illiterate 0.425 0.247 0.598 0.332 0.498 Sishu/home school and below 0.189 0.233 0.145 0.187 0.190 Elementary school 0.171 0.231 0.112 0.190 0.155 Middle school 0.127 0.168 0.088 0.156 0.104 High school and above 0.088 0.119 0.057 0.133 0.052 Log PCE 8.408 8.429 8.388 8.689 8.185 Number of observations 2,293 1,131 1,162 1,017 1,276 SOURCE: Data from CHARLS 2008 Pilot.
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[1.957] Any Activities Yes No All Female Male All Female Male 9.02 8.596 9.41 8.25 7.785 8.7 [1.916]
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To go beyond a simple two-way association, we estimated OLS association regressions that control for other confounding factors in Tables 12-6 (for mental intactness) and 12-7 (for episodic memory)
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293 YUQING HU, XIAOYAN LEI, JAMES P SMITH, and YAOHUI ZHAO TABLE 12-5 Description of Other Characteristics: Community Region Province Community-Level Variables Overall Urban Rural Zhejiang Gansu % of female 0.501 0.533 0.486 0.501 0.504 # of big surnames 1.615 1.476 1.679 1.428 1.831 # of kindergartens 1.098 1.479 0.719 1.168 0.979 distance from kindergarten 2.551 0.893 0.675 1.932 3.436 # of primary school 0.651 0.444 0.815 0.358 1.003 distance from primary school 0.772 1.991 4.150 2.998 0.129 # of middle schools 0.188 0.291 0.106 0.191 0.185 distance from middle school 3.190 1.993 3.106 1.305 3.590 # of senior high schools 0.045 0.101 0.000 0.066 0.019 distance from senior high school 11.461 5.848 15.789 8.129 15.588 # of post offices 0.181 0.313 0.076 0.163 0.203 distance from post office 4.224 2.057 6.000 2.809 5.989 # of libraries 0.438 0.657 0.264 0.629 0.209 distance from the library 8.726 3.363 12.765 2.552 16.255 # of theatres 0.085 0.170 0.017 0.073 0.099 distance from the theatre 13.367 5.469 19.875 7.347 21.004 # of nursing homes 0.081 0.128 0.043 0.095 0.064 distance from nursing home 9.491 6.668 11.619 3.848 18.530 # of bus lines 2.123 3.306 1.194 2.880 1.197 distance from bus line 2.253 0.886 3.313 0.434 4.502 distance from train station 81.811 81.665 81.915 84.846 78.399 % of people having telephones 64.714 73.178 60.800 74.218 53.716 % of people having cellphones 77.013 88.549 71.679 88.815 63.355 Whether the medical care is poor 0.017 0.023 0.013 0.000 0.036 Log public expenditure during the 8.514 10.469 7.621 11.936 4.560 past year Log per capita income 8.124 8.584 7.791 8.905 7.253 Observations 2,293 1,017 1,276 1,253 1,040 SOURCE: Data from CHARLS 2008 Pilot.
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Among the few that are significant, better mental intactness is associated with shorter distance between community center and the mostcommonly used middle school and/or a library and a higher number of bus lines. The share of female population exhibits a positive sign, even though the female dummy is negatively associated with cognition.
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(0.058) # of middle schools –0.005 (0.137)
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, the significance of percentage female disap pears, supporting the hypotheses here.9 Table 12-7 illustrates a parallel OLS association estimation in which EM is regressed on variables representing social activities and the same set of other control variables included in the MI model.10 Both any social activity participation collectively and interacting with friends or playing card games are strongly statistically associated with EM. In addition, in the second model that includes the single measure of participation in any social activity it is strongly related to our measure of episodic memory.
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0.047 (0.060) # of middle schools –0.069 (0.142)
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Summarizing our results, OLS association regressions with multiple SA measures provide evidence of a positive correlation between cognitive functioning and participation in social activities. Despite the salient association, closer scrutiny is needed because OLS regressions may be biased due to the endogeneity of people's participation decisions, an issue presented in the next section.
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Tables 12-8 and 12-9 give the OLS reduced form estimates of the associations of community facilities and the two types of cognitive functions, MI and EM, respectively. Similarly as before, we employ two models in each table.
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The likely explanation is that having activity centers for the elderly allowing for more involvement in playing Mahjong, chess, or cards, which further promotes episodic memory. Accordingly, from the second model, we see significant correlation between any of the facilities and episodic memory, which is most likely driven by the effect of having activity centers for the elderly.
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(2) Community Facilities Outdoor facilities 0.042 (0.166)
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(2) Community Facilities Outdoor facilities 0.266 (0.171)
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Second, participation in social activities is highly dependent on respondents' socioeconomic status and community environment. Third, OLS association results show that playing Mahjong, chess, or card games and interacting with friends are significantly related to episodic memory, both individually and taken as a whole (any of the three activities)
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. Causes and consequences of cognitive functioning across the life course.
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. Social networks, social integration, and social engagement determine cognitive decline in community-dwelling Spanish older adults.
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