Virginia Maria Borsa

Background: Many protective factors promote psychological well-being (PWB) in the elderly and contribute to healthy aging, such as engagement, positive emotions, and cognitive reserve (CR), which includes education, leisure, and work activities. CR sustains cognitive functioning and positively correlates with creativity, particularly divergent thinking (DT), helping older adults cope with everyday challenges and enhancing their PWB. Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the relationships between DT, CR, PWB, memory functions, depression, stress, and anxiety indexes even in the Blue Zone (BZ), an area known for extraordinary longevity and high PWB. Methods: A total of 165 Italian healthy older adults (Mage = 73.8, SD = 6.7) from Milan (MI), Bergamo (BG), Cagliari (CA), and BZ were enrolled and divided into four groups according to their origin. Generalized linear models (GLMs) with normal and gamma link functions were used. Results: BZ presented higher DT and PWB indices than the cities but lower CR, particularly in education. Conclusions: This study highlights the influence of DT in supporting cognitive functions and PWB, suggesting that PWB and DT are key protective factors in aging.

Background: The embodied cognition approach, as applied to concrete knowledge, is centred on the role of the perceptual and motor aspects of experience. To extend the embodied framework to abstract knowledge, some studies have suggested that further dimensions, such as affective or social experiences, are relevant for the semantic representations of abstract concepts. The objective of this study is to develop a measure that can quantitatively capture the multidimensional nature of abstract concepts. Methods: We used dimension-rating methods, known to be suitable, to account for the semantic representations of abstract concepts, to develop a new database of 964 Italian words, rated by 542 participants. Besides classical psycholinguistic variables (i.e., concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic diversity) and affective norms (i.e., valence, arousal), we collected ratings on selected dimensions characterizing the semantic representations of abstract concepts, i.e., introspective, mental state, quantitative, spatial, social, moral, theoretical, and economic dimensions. The measure of exclusivity was incorporated to quantify the number of dimensions, and the respective relevance, for each concept. Concepts with a high value of exclusivity rely on only one/a few dimension/s with high value on the respective rating scale. Results: A multidimensional representation characterized most abstract concepts, with two robust major clusters. The first was characterized by dense intersections among introspective, mental state, social, and moral dimensions; the second, less interconnected, cluster revolved around quantitative, spatial, theoretical, and economic dimensions. Quantitative, theoretical, and economic concepts obtained higher exclusivity values. Conclusions: The present study contributes to the investigation of the semantic organization of abstract words and supports a controlled selection and definition of stimuli for clinical and research settings.

Background/Objectives: A neurobiological framework of bi- or multilingual neurocognitive development must consider the following: (i) longitudinal behavioral and neural measures; (ii) brain developmental constraints across structure and function; and (iii) the development of global multilingual competence in a homogeneous social environment. In this study, we investigated whether multilingual competence yields early changes in executive attention control mechanisms and their underlying neural structures in the frontal–striatal system, such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex/pre-supplemental area and the left caudate. Methods: We employed longitudinal neuroimaging and functional connectivity methods in a small group of multilingual children over two years. Results: We found that the dACC/preSMA is functionally influenced by changes in multilingual competence but not yet structurally adapted, while the left caudate, in a developmental stage, is influenced, adapts, and specializes due to multilingual experience. Furthermore, increases in multilingual competence strengthen connections between the dACC/preSMA, left caudate, and other structures of the cognitive control network, such as the right inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral inferior parietal lobules. Conclusions: These findings suggest that multilingual competence impacts brain “adaptation” and “specialization” during childhood. The results may provide insights and guide future research on experience-expectant and experience-dependent brain plasticity to explain the “interaction” between multilingualism and neurodevelopment.

The maintenance of psychological well-being (PWB) in the older adult population is a pivotal goal for our rapidly aging society. PWB is a multicomponent construct that can be influenced by several factors in the lifespan. The beneficial role of divergent thinking (DT) and cognitive reserve (CR) in sustaining older subjects’ PWB has been scarcely investigated so far. The present study aims to investigate the relationships between DT, CR, and PWB in a sample of 121 healthy older adults (61 females; M age: 73.39 ± 6.66 years; M education: 11.33 ± 4.81 years). The results highlight that better DT performance predicts higher CR, which mediates an indirect positive effect of DT on emotional competence, one of the PWB factors. It follows that DT and CR can be considered protective factors in aging, and their effects go beyond cognitive functioning, revealing a positive effect even on some PWB components. The practical implications regarding targeted health interventions for prevention in the older adult population to support well-being and promote healthy aging are discussed.

Promoting active and successful aging has become crucial to improve quality of life in later adulthood and reduce the impact of cognitive decline. Increasing evidence suggested that the ability to think creatively (e.g., via divergent thinking), similar to cognitive reserve, could represent a beneficial factor against the negative effects of aging. However, there is still little evidence investigating the relationships between divergent thinking, cognitive functions, and cognitive reserve in late adulthood. The present study explored these relationships in a sample of 98 individuals ranging from 61 to 88 years old (mean age: 72.44 ± 6.35). Results showed that visual, but not verbal, divergent thinking was affected by aging. Interestingly, visual divergent thinking performance was predicted by both the cognitive component of crystallized intelligence and cognitive reserve. Only the crystallized component of intelligence was found to mediate the aging effect on visual divergent thinking performance. These results suggest that in later adulthood a potential shift strategy to prior knowledge and semantic components over executive and control components of cognition could underlie a preserved ability to think divergently and, plausibly, creatively. Limitations of the study and implications for successful aging are discussed.