Making Older Adults' Cognitive Health Visible After Covid-19 Outbreak

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Francesco Della Gatta¹  Chiara Terribili²  Elisa Fabrizi²  Carmen Moret-Tatay² 

[1] Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir;Department of Neuroscience, Mental Health and Sense Organs (NESMOS), Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome;MEB Lab (Mind, Emotion and Behavioural Laboratory), Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir

关键词: older adults;    gender;    cognitive health;    COVID-19;    lockdown;    metacognition;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648208

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to humankind.Community-dwelling older adults are considered one of the most vulnerable profiles andtheir chronic conditions might be aggravated by the consequences of lockdown (Burrai et al.,2020; Cordellieri et al., 2021; Pongan et al., 2021). Innovative approaches, supported by evidencedisaggregated by age but also gender and relevant socio-economic characteristics, are crucial toeffective public policy making that is inclusive for them. According to the WHO Department ofGender (2002), gender is used to describe the characteristics of women and men that are sociallyconstructed. While gender perspective in the measures taken to combat Covid-19 outbreak shouldensure gender equity for community-dwelling older adults, training certain individual factorsmight be an opportunity to address, or at least slow down, the negative effects of the current healthcrisis. In this way, several recent findings suggest that targeting metacognition skills might playan important role not only on technology adoption, but also in anxiety (Tsumura and Robertson,2017; Capobianco et al., 2020). From an exploratory perspective, we discuss the effects on othercognitive processes, such as visuospatial navigation, one of the skills that might have suffered mostfrom the effects of the restriction measures during covid-19.The training of metacognitive awareness as a strategy might be of interest to address not onlydeficits underlying Cognitive Health, but also the gender gap described in previous literature,especially for older adults.

【 授权许可】

CC BY