A - 21Poorer Memory and Executive Functioning Across the Lifespan: Contributions of Alexithymia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: Alexithymia is a trait characterized by difficulty identifying feelings (DIF), describing feelings (DDF), and externally oriented thinking (EOT). Limited alexithymia research suggests poorer memory for emotive materials and possible executive functioning (EF) impairment. As alexithymia, memory, and EF all worsen with age, we predicted poorer EF and delayed memory associated with higher alexithymia in healthy, cognitively intact adults across the lifespan. Method: Experiment 1: 40 young adults (age 18–35, 29 female) and 104 elders (age 48–86, 68 female) completed tests of EF (Trail-making (TMT), symbol-digit modalities, category fluency), and alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20)). Experiment 2: 34 young adults (19 female, age 18–22) and 87 elders (62 female, age 50–92) completed the TAS-20 and TMT, and a subset completed delayed narrative memory tests (34 young, 42 elders). Results: Across both studies, hierarchical regression significantly predicted EF by age (p < .001) and sex (p < .05) in Step 1, with significant addition by alexithymia in Step 2 via DIF (p < .05). In Experiment 2, age and sex predicted memory in Step 1 (age p < .001; sex p = .01), with EOT contributing in Step 2 (p = .07). In elders where memory scores had greater range, EOT made a strong contribution (p = .007). Conclusions: EF was poorer in older age, male sex, and higher alexithymia (DIF) in young and older adults. Delayed memory was similarly predicted but by EOT, especially in elders. Moreover, memory effects were apparent with neutral memoranda in this large sample. Thus, alexithymia should be considered in future studies due to its influence on cognitive functioning across the lifespan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".