There is the controversial idea about the psycho-affective decline over the years, which frames the elderly as a depressed person, which generates negative stereotypes about old age. However, although over the years the older adult presents changes at a physical, cognitive and language level, they also have psycho-emotional goals aimed at discovering new roles in life and in general looking for new means to preserve role and maintain participation in that social context. Precisely one of the dimensions of human functioning is communication and social interaction, which encompasses human experiences related to the ways of being, being and relating to the world (Nussbaum, 2003), which in turn implies the provision of personal resources -including cognitive and emotional status- and environmental for the full enjoyment of life. In this sense, one of the most determining aspects in communication and social interaction is emotional language; Hence, it is necessary to understand the psycholinguistic substrate of the processing of verbal emotional information that is perceived in the social context, which in part determines the success of communicative interactions and the achievement of psycho-emotional goals in the relationship with others , according to age and life cycle. Although a facilitating effect of the emotional content of the words is reported, in healthy older adults. Even so, it is necessary to understand the relationship between emotional processing of language and communicative and social functioning, and perhaps find if there is any differential marker between the young adult and the older adult. Therefore, the objective of this preliminary project is to determine if there is an effect of the processing of emotional words on the socio-communicative functionality in the elderly. The design incorporates a lexical decision task, in which a group of older adults and young adults will participate, with no neurological antecedents, or implications in the mental or emotional sphere that compromise the performance of the task. Those with uncorrected visual and hearing problems and moderate or severe depressive symptoms will be excluded. The informed consent of the participants will be obtained. In this sense, it is expected that there is a directly proportional relationship between measures of communicative functioning and the effect of processing positive valence stimuli.
publication date
February 3, 2021 3:07 PM
Research
keywords
Communicative and social functioning in the elderly
