Functional impairment representations and behavioral intentions in later life: a motivational perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Functional impairments among older adults are associated with reduced quality of life and greater healthcare burden. However, how older adults cognitively and emotionally represent these impairments and how such representations relate to behavioral intentions (i.e. intentions to engage in recommended health behaviors) remains underexplored. This study applies the Common Sense Model of Self-Regulation to examine whether representations of impairments are shaped by age-related defensive motivation and how they are associated with behavioral intentions. METHODS: Three hundred one Canadian adults aged 50-95 completed within-person assessments of cognitive and emotional representations across six functional impairments and reported health behavior intentions for each. RESULTS: Older age was associated with more positive emotional representations of functional limitations, and perceived timeline (acute vs chronic impairment) moderated the association between age and consequence representations. Specifically, older adults reported less severe perceived consequences for functional impairments perceived as chronic as compared with those perceived as acute. Timeline representations did not moderate the associations of age with identity, personal control, and treatment control representations. Cognitive representations of functional impairments, in turn, predicted behavioral intentions to manage the functional impairment: more perceived negative consequences, stronger identity representations, and higher perceived treatment control were associated with stronger behavioral intentions, while higher personal control was unexpectedly associated with lower behavioral intentions. A moderated mediation analysis revealed that, for chronic impairments only, older age was associated with lower behavioral intentions to manage a functional impairment through less perceived negative consequences . DISCUSSION: These findings highlight a motivational tradeoff in aging, where emotional self-protection may undermine proactive health behaviors, and suggest it is important to balance emotional self-protection with accurate threat perception.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".