Abstract
Aging is a dynamic process that can bring well-being but also physical and cognitive decline. Older adults can draw on their personal resources to help them cope and thrive through the aging process. Having personal resources to cope and ensure older adults’ well-being is important. Psychological strengths such as a sense of coherence, resilience, and coping are protective against the adversity associated with health problems such as those stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study’s purpose was to investigate the usefulness of reminiscence therapy for older women living in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. A sample composed of 29 older women was evaluated with the Purpose-in-Life Test (PIL), Sense of Coherence (SOC-13) and Brief Cope Inventory (COPE-28). Our reminiscence program consisted of 10 sessions lasting 60 min each. Reminiscence therapy is a psychological intervention for older adults to assist in remembering and interpreting the life events, feelings, and thoughts that define and give meaning to the person’s life. Reminiscence can lead to positive mental health and other elements of particular relevance to older adults. In each session, we worked on a different theme that promoted the memory of positive emotions: optimal experience, decisive moment, stresses, tensions, problems and solutions, memories of childhood, adolescence, maturity, significant people in life, sense of life, and future script. We compared an intervention group (n = 12) with a control group (n = 17) using a pre-post, single-blind design. Significant results were obtained and showed that reminiscence therapy was effective in increasing meaning of life, sense of coherence, and coping in older women. The reminiscence therapy applied yielded positive effects in older female participants living in a nursing home during COVID-19 pandemic.
Highlights
Our study aims to develop and evaluate a psychoeducational program based on reminiscence therapy, to enhance meaning of life, sense of coherence, and coping ability in older women living in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic
We analyzed the efficacy of reminiscence therapy (RT) performed after the situation provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic, obtaining positive results for meaning of life and sense of coherence as well as for coping strategies in a sample of older women living in nursing homes
There are few studies that have analyzed the effect of RT on the meaning of life [29,30,31]; it should be noted that all obtained higher scores after the intervention, which supports our results, suggesting that an intervention in reminiscence is an effective tool to improve the meaning of life of older women living in nursing homes, and much more so during the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
Recover autobiographical memories of positive events, reinterpret positive experiences and emotions, consolidate the identity and integrity of the self by evaluating achievements and giving meaning to life. Recover autobiographical memories of negative events, reinterpret negative experiences and emotions, consolidate identity and integrity of self by evaluating coping strategies. Recovering specific autobiographical memories and “decisive moments of life”, reconstructing and searching for meaning and sense of past events, consolidating identity, coherence, and attribution of meaning to experiences. Recover autobiographical memories and construction of life episodes from childhood, evoke positive or negative emotions and integrate them into the present to consolidate meaning and coherence for experiences
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