Cognitive Aging | Dr. Schmank's Academic Website

Does Emotion Suppression Impair Cognitive Ability?

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we age the cognitive abilities and mechanisms associated with processing speed, executive functioning, inhibitory control, and working memory show relative declines; despite these declines, however, older adults are much more proficient at regulating their emotions and emotional behaviors—an experience that often requires the coordination of cognitive resources to achieve. The current project was conducted to understand whether effortful emotion regulation, specifically the suppression of negative emotion, was more cognitively taxing for young adult participants (between the ages of 18-30) than for older adult participants (above the age of 60). Data was collected online using CloudResearch and Prolific. This project was completed as one of two side projects of the DARCI Project and functioned as my PhD dissertation research topic.

Research question: Does aging impact how emotion regulation relates to processing speed performance? Regulating one’s emotions, especially suppression of an emotional response, requires cognitive resources to complete and is a process that involves constant monitoring and updating. Thus, while suppressing emotional experiences and behavior subsequent (i.e., concurrent) cognitive task performance should suffer due to overlapping/shared mental resources. Additionally, different outcomes were hypothesized for older compared to younger adults—specifically that the degree of impairment on subsequent cognitive tasks due to effortful emotion regulation usage would be greater for younger adults.

The dissertation project was successfully defended on April 3rd, 2025 and the manuscript was submitted as a preprint to PsyArXiv via the Open Science Framework.

Age Differences Among Psychometric Models of Intelligence

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The positive manifold is one of the most frequently replicated findings in cognitive psychology and has often been explored using factor analysis (Spearman, 1904; Conway & Kovacs, 2013). Well-known models of cognition are typically organized such that manifest variables load onto respective latent factors representing specific cognitive abilities, and some posit a higher-order factor of general ability, g. It has been well established that cognitive abilities change across the lifespan (Craik & Salthouse, 2011), yet there is less work examining how factor models of cognitive ability compare across different age groups.

The current project used data from the Hungarian-Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale-fourth edition (H-WAISIV; Weschler; 2008) to compare models of cognitive ability for both young (18-40 years) and older adults (65 + years). An exploratory factor analysis conducted on the young adult data (n = 457) produced a four factor model that explained 67% of the variance in the data. This factor structure was then used to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the older adult data (n = 305). The CFA produced good fit to the data, that was not significantly improved by adding a higher-order factor. Finally, in line with recent criticisms of using latent variable modeling (see Borsboom, Mellenbergh, & van Heerden, 2003) an exploratory psychometric network analysis was conducted on young adult data and a confirmatory psychometric network analysis was then applied to the older adult data, which produced similar, well-fitting results.

Intriguingly, the older adult network demonstrates stronger connections between all measures sampled by the H-WAISIV, as indicated by the thicker blue edges or lines connecting nodes or measures in the network. This implies that performance on these psychological tasks were more related for older adults compared to their young adult counterparts. More research is required to explain what these psychometric networks indicate, however, additional research has indicated that psychometric networks fit intelligence data as well if not better than latent variable models.

The DARCI Project

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The goal of this multi-study research project was the assessment of the psychological constructs of Crystallized Intelligence (i.e., general knowledge) and Fluid Intelligence (i.e., reasoning) data as well as novel data on adult Rationality (i.e., good thinking) among age groups of younger and older adults. This is one of the first online efforts to gather this type of individual differences data, and the establishment of the underlying structure of responses for both young and older adult participants would be a first for Intelligence and Rationality data of this sort. We were also interested in whether tasks that measure Rationality share more variance with tests of Crystallized Intelligence or Fluid Intelligence. Manuscripts are in-progress for this research.

Tip-of-the-Tongue Research

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon occurs during language production when an individual experiences problematic language production even though they are aware of and know the word or name they are attempting to produce. In that moment, language production fails and they are unable to produce the word or name they are targeting. This phenomenon results in a feeling as if the word/name is on the tip of the tongue (i.e., that production of the word or name is imminent) and is often associated with feelings of frustration.

This phenomenon has been studied in laboratory settings by presenting participants with word definitions (“What is the name of the hair spider with a painful but non-venomous bite?”) or photos of celebrities or otherwise famous individuals. These stimuli provide the participant with semantic information associated with the word or famous name of interest, however, often the syntactic information (i.e., linguistic elements or phonemes) needed for successful language production is lacking or missing completely.

As a research assistant during my bachelor’s (Saint Louis University) and master’s program (University of Colorado Colorado Springs) was heavily focused on the impact of psychosocial factors on language producation ability. For instance, in one study it was determined that increased levels of psychosocial stress led participants to report higher proportions of language production failures, qualified by tip-of-the-tongue occurrences. Later, it was demonstrated that participants who believed they were being observed during a language production task following a high-stress induction condition experienced greater degrees of language production failures.

The connected OSF page contains three posters and two publications. Posters were submitted to the American Psychological Association Conference (2013) and Psychonomic Society Conferences (2014; 2016). Publications concern experimental psychological research conducted at both Saint Louis University (James et al., 2017) and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (Schmank & James, 2019)