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The Association of Leisure Activities in middle adulthood with cognitive performance in old age: the mediation role of social capital The association of leisure activities in middle adulthood with cognitive performance in old age: the mediating role of social capital. Julia Sauter 1 , Matthias Kliegel 2 , Eric Widmer 3 , Andreas Ihle 4 Introduction / Theoretical Background Leading an active lifestyle, in terms of intellectual activities and social participation is substantial to maintain high levels of cognitive functioning in old age (Anstey & Smith, 1999; Fritsch et al., 2007). According to the cognitive reserve account, a buffer against cognitive decline can be built up across the life span depending on early stimulation of cognitive resources, for example, through formal school education as well as cognitive activities during later life (Stern, 2002). Over the last decades, there has been increasing evidence detailing the beneficial roles of several specific factors in this context, highlighting the importance of intellectual leisure activities such as learning a new language or the cognitive level of job for explaining interindividual differences in cognitive functioning in old age (Aartsen, Smits, Van Tilburg, Knipscheer, & Deeg, 2002; Bielak, Cherbuin, Bunce, & Anstey, 2014). Amongst those life course factors, more and more attention has recently been given to social variables and it has been suggested that leading a socially active life is at least as important for the build-up of cognitive reserve as being engaged in cognitively demanding leisure or professional activities (Aartsen, Smits, Van Tilburg, Knipscheer, & Deeg, 2002; Andreas Ihle, 1 NCCR LIVES, Interdisciplinary Centre for Gerontology and the Study of Vulnerability, University of Geneva, Switzerland. 2 Department of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Centre for Gerontology and the Study of Vulnerability, University of Geneva, Switzerland. 3 Department of Sociology, University of Geneva, Switzerland. 4 Department of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Centre for Gerontology and the Study of Vulnerability, University of Geneva, Switzerland. 1

The Association of Leisure Activities in middle adulthood with cognitive performance in old age: the mediation role of social capital Oris, Fagot, Maggiori, & Kliegel, 2016; Andreas Ihle et al., 2016). For example, many activity lists that had been used to measure the participation of individuals in leisure activities contain activities that have important social components such as doing sports, going to the theater, or even more clearly participating in associations or clubs, or playing party games (cards, board games, etc.) (Ihle et al., 2015). Moreover, those social leisure activities represent one dimension of the individual’s social resources, from which emotional or practical support can be drawn when needed by the elderly, and social support has been shown to be crucial to cognitive functioning in old age (Hall & Wellman, 1985; Wang, Karp, Winblad, & Fratiglioni, 2002). In details, it has been reported that having a supportive personal network with various types of relationships (e.g. kinship, friends, neighbors, etc.) has a significant positive effect on cognitive functioning in older adults (Bennett, Schneider, Tang, Arnold, & Wilson, 2006; Crooks, Lubben, Petitti, Little, & Chiu, 2008; Ellwardt et al., 2015). From a conceptual perspective, it is thus important to further investigate the role of the social dimension in the build-up of cognitive reserve. So far, research in cognitive gerontology has relied on rather crude assessments of social resources. Thus, in the present study we aim to expand this perspective by adopting a more fine-grained perspective on the social resources of aging individuals motivated by recent theoretical accounts from sociology (REF) that may help to disentangle the role of different facets of social factors in the build-up of cognitive reserve. From a social capital perspective, social resources include several different dimensions. First, they refer to support that is derived from the personal network of the older adult. Network analysis “[…] focuses on the characteristic patterns of ties between actors in a social system rather than on characteristics of the individual actors themselves and use these descriptions to study how these social structures constrain network member’s behavior” (Hall & Wellman, 1985, p. 26). Specifically, we will take a deeper look into the concept of social capital. Social capital can be 2

The Association of Leisure Activities in middle adulthood with cognitive performance in old age: the mediation role of social capital defined as: “Resources embedded in a social structure which are accessed and/or mobilized in purposive actions” (Lin, 2006, p. 12). Therefore, social capital indicates the support an individual can give and receive from his network members. Moreover, a distinction between two different types of social capital can be made (Widmer, 2010). Bonding social capital occurs in dense networks in which members are highly connected. Bonding social capital provides the focal individual with high levels of support, because network members are connected with one another and can therefore easily organize the needed support. But bonding social capital also hinders the autonomy of the focal individual and its freedom of decision-making. Bridging social capital is available in less dense networks where focal individuals hold strategic intermediary positions between network members (Burt, 2000). Thus, bridging social capital allows the focal individual to have more independence within his or her network, but it is also less supportive than bonding social capital (Girardin & Widmer, 2015). Although those two types of social capital have distinct features, they may both occur at the same time in an individual’s personal network (Widmer, 2010). In terms of predicting differential effects of those dimensions on the build-up of cognitive reserve, several hypotheses are possible. Taken together, the present study aims to extend the literature by investigating in more detail the interplay of engaging in cognitively stimulating leisure activities, social capital, and cognitive performance in a large cross sectional sample of older adults. To overcome the possible limitation of a cross sectional setting, in the present analyses we focus on activity participation in middle adulthood (age 45), the current cognitive status at time of testing (age ranging from 65 to 100) and the social capital in the recent past before test time. This allows to approach the role of individual differences in social capital as possible consequence of social participation in earlier lifespan phases and test for their respective direct and indirect effects on cognitive health in old age. Specifically, our goal was to examine whether higher levels of available social capital (and here 3

The Association of Leisure Activities in middle adulthood with cognitive performance in old age: the mediation role of social capital which dimensions especially) may mediate the relation between midlife leisure activity profiles and current cognitive functioning in old age. Materials and Methods Sample We used data from the Vivre-Leben-Vivere survey, an ongoing project started in 2011 on life conditions of elderly people living in five different cantons (Geneva, Valais, Bern, Basel, Ticino) of Switzerland. The main sample (n=3080) was randomly selected in the cantonal and national population records and stratified by age (65-69, 70-74, 75-79, 80-84, 85-89, 90 and older), gender and canton. For the sample of the present study, we only retained participants who were cognitively healthy and who had answered the questions about their personal networks, which leads to a sample of 2788 individuals (see Table 1 for sample characteristics). Cognitive Performance Verbal Abilities We administered the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale (Deltour, 1993) measuring verbal abilities. For each item, participants had to underline the word, which was intermixed with five distractor words, that semantically matched the target word. After one exercise item, participants were presented with ten of those vocabulary items, without any time limit. The verbal abilities score was the proportion of correctly completed items. Processing Speed We assessed the Trail Making Test Part A (Reitan, 1958) measuring processing speed. After seven exercise items, participants had to correctly connect the numbers 1-25 as fast as possible in the ascending order. The processing speed score was the time in seconds needed to 4