Jenna Wells
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Cornell University
Emily Mroz
Postdoctoral Fellow in Geriatrics, Yale University
Background: There are over 11 million adults providing unpaid care for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in the United States, and this number will rise exponentially as the population ages. Although providing family support for a loved one with dementia can be a meaningful and rewarding experience, caregivers report profoundly elevated levels of depression, anxiety, and physical health problems, compared to similarly aged non-caregiving adults. Uncovering novel sources of variation in current and former dementia caregivers’ health that are amenable to change via pragmatic interventions has thus been defined as a priority goal of aging research. We will conduct interviews with current and former caregivers to elicit two relationship defining narratives: one from before the onset of dementia, and one from during dementia caregiving. We will also measure self-reported health, well-being, relationship quality, and caregiving history. Eliciting narratives from before and during caregiving will enable us to explore changes in how caregivers describe their relationship across these two relational contexts. Further, studying both current and former caregivers will elucidate how narration changes over time, guiding the selection of end-users for a future intervention.
Aim 1: To examine how current and former caregivers’ socioemotional language use (i.e., pronouns, emotion words) in relationship-defining narratives associates with their health and well-being.
Aim 2: To examine how inclusion of narrative elaborations in current and former caregivers’
relationship-defining narratives associates with their health and well-being.
Aim 3: To explore group-level differences in current versus former caregivers’ pronouns, emotion words, and narrative elaborations in their relationship-defining narratives.