Accelerated Decline in Sense of Purpose in Life Years Prior to Dementia Diagnosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research has pointed to sense of purpose in life as an important individual difference that promotes successful aging, predicting greater psychological wellbeing, physical functioning, and cognitive health in older adulthood. Despite such benefits, it is unclear how major life challenges such as the onset of cognitive impairment may impact the sense of purpose of older adults. Building on this, the present study examined long-term change in sense of purpose in a longitudinal sample of older adults who would later develop dementia. Data were from 341 participants without dementia at study intake who were subsequently diagnosed with dementia during the follow-up period (Mage = 81.92 years at intake, Mage = 89.19 years at diagnosis, 72.72% female). Participants completed annual assessments of purpose in life up to 17 years prior to dementia diagnosis (M = 6.99 assessments prior to diagnosis). Piecewise growth modeling examined change in sense of purpose in life with time structured as years to diagnosis. Results suggested a period of accelerated decline distinct from normative age-related change beginning around 5.60 years prior to dementia onset. Discussion will focus on two potential explanations: that perceiving declines in cognition may lead to diminished sense of purpose in life or that underlying changes in the brain may impact both cognition and sense of purpose resulting in concurrent decline over time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".