Depressive Symptoms as a Mediator of the Association Between Functional Social Support and Executive Function: A Moderated Mediation Analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging’s Comprehensive Cohort
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Social support and depression are modifiable factors that can affect cognition. Social support and depression may be related through the influence of close relationships on emotional regulation; however, few studies have investigated whether depression mediates the relationship between social support and key domains of cognition, such as executive function. OBJECTIVES: To explore whether depressive symptoms mediate the association between functional social support and executive function, and to ascertain if age and sex moderate this mediation. METHODS: Analyses were based on baseline and three-year follow-up data (n=16,421) from the Comprehensive cohort of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, a population-based study of adults aged 45–85 years at baseline. Baseline functional social support was measured with the \nMedical Outcomes Survey-Social Support Survey, follow-up executive function with a combined z-score of five cognitive tests, and follow-up depressive symptoms with the 10-item Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Conditional process analysis, a robust strategy based on a linear regression framework, was used to evaluate moderated mediation. RESULTS: After adjusting for sociodemographic, health, and lifestyle covariates, depressive symptoms at baseline significantly mediated the association between functional social support and executive function. This mediated effect was significant across most age and sex subgroups, with the exception of males and females 65–74 years old. CONCLUSION: At least some of the benefits of social support on executive function depend on the positive effects of social support on depressive symptoms. Social support interventions with components addressing depression may be effective at promoting executive function in middle-aged and older adults.
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 | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".