Abstract
Numerous studies have suggested that educational history, as a proxy measure of active cognitive reserve, protects against age-related cognitive decline and risk of dementia. Whether educational history also protects against age-related decline in emotional intelligence (EI) is unclear. The present study examined ability EI in 310 healthy adults ranging in age from 18 to 76 years using the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). We found that older people had lower scores than younger people for total EI and for the EI branches of perceiving, facilitating, and understanding emotions, whereas age was not associated with the EI branch of managing emotions. We also found that educational history protects against this age-related EI decline by mediating the relationship between age and EI. In particular, the EI scores of older adults with a university education were higher than those of older adults with primary or secondary education, and similar to those of younger adults of any education level. These findings suggest that the cognitive reserve hypothesis, which states that individual differences in cognitive processes as a function of lifetime intellectual activities explain differential susceptibility to functional impairment in the presence of age-related changes and brain pathology, applies also to EI, and that education can help preserve cognitive-emotional structures during aging.
Highlights
Cognitive functions decline with age, including the speed of information processing and memory performance (Salthouse et al, 1996; Bisiacchi et al, 2008; Johnson et al, 2009)
The emotional intelligence (EI) reserve hypothesis is that individual differences in EI as a function of lifetime intellectual activities explain differential vulnerability to functional impairment in the presence of age-related changes
We show that in our population, educational level appears to protect against age-related EI decline, providing the first evidence that educational level helps to counteract gradual losses in cognitive function and in EI
Summary
Cognitive functions decline with age, including the speed of information processing and memory performance (Salthouse et al, 1996; Bisiacchi et al, 2008; Johnson et al, 2009). Numerous studies have used educational level as a proxy measure of the active component CR This literature suggests that prior education may protect against age-related cognitive decline and risk of dementia (for a review, Summers et al, 2013). A meta-analysis showed that education reduces the risk of incident dementia (Valenzuela and Sachdev, 2006), while a longitudinal study of Catholic clergy found that education modulates the risk of Alzheimer’s disease (Bennett et al, 2003). These findings have been confirmed in the general population (Roe et al, 2007; Santos et al, 2013). The CR hypothesis states that individual differences in cognitive processes as a function of lifetime intellectual activities explain differential susceptibility to functional impairment in the presence of age-related changes and brain pathology (Barulli and Stern, 2013)
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