Диссертации, представленные на защиту и подготовленные в НИУ ВШЭ

Our aging world is faced with the ever-growing incidence of dementia and age-related cognitive decline. In the absence of satisfactory pharmacological treatments, it becomes increasingly important to identify alternative, lifestyle-based approaches to preventing and mitigating age-related cognitive impairments. The leading theoretical framework in this area is that of so-called cognitive reserve (CR). CR is defined as the level of resilience of an individual’s cognitive processes to age-related brain deterioration. One experience-related factor that has been linked to CR build-up is bilingualism: by means of a constant additional cognitive effort required to control dual-language use, bilinguals strengthen their neurocognitive substrate which provides a protective effect against age-related cognitive decline, mediated by the CR mechanism. In my PhD research, I examined the role of individual life experiences, bilingualism in particular, in promoting the development of CR during the entire lifespan. Moreover, to tackle the long-standing issue of CR measurability, I refined recent approaches to devise a novel method for quantifying CR directly. For the first time in the literature, I tested its validity by comparing it with traditional approaches to measuring CR. This newly-developed measure may contribute to advancing the theoretical framework of CR, as well as inform the clinical practice, enabling new approaches in the fight against cognitive aging through the design of personalized care plans. Individuating CR-enhancing factors and their underlying mechanisms may provide a tool to improve senior citizens’ quality of life, and ease the economic burden on healthcare systems and public funds.

The thesis examined how specific executive functions (i.e., updating, shifting, and inhibition) relate to emotion regulation strategies (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression), and to understand if executive functions working with affective information are more related to emotion regulation. Four major experiments were carried out. Overall, the results showed that the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies manifests itself differently depending on the type of measures used during the assessment. Non-affective and affective tasks of executive functions do not differ in their relationship with emotion regulation strategies. While higher updating was related to cognitive reappraisal, inhibition was associated with the more frequent use of expressive suppression. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to existing theories and practice.