Early retirement negatively affects the brain. Free Technical Library News

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Early retirement negatively affects the brain

15.01.2023

Scientists at Binghamton University have found that early retirement can negatively impact the brain and accelerate cognitive decline. The researchers analyzed an array of data on the health status of retirees in China. Scientists believe that the negative impact of early retirement on the brain may be due to a decrease in social activity.

The new study focused on government health data from a pension scheme introduced in China in 2009. Due to rising poverty among older people in some rural areas of the country, the program offered people a stable income if they retired within a few years of reaching age 60.

By collecting decades of data, the researchers were able to compare the health and cognitive outcomes of those participating in the early retirement program with a matching group of people who are still working in their 60s. The results showed that those who participated in the early retirement program showed deterioration in cognitive skills over the following years compared to people near retirement age.

Scientists also showed a more interesting pattern. Although participants in the pension plan showed cognitive decline, they also showed an improvement in overall health. These early retirees tended to reduce their alcohol intake, quit smoking, and generally slept better. According to Plamen Nikolov, one of the project's lead researchers, this interesting discrepancy between general and cognitive health suggests that certain aspects of retirement are likely to negatively affect the brain. The scientist notes:

In general, the adverse effect of early retirement on mental and social activity far outweighs the protective effect of the program on various forms of health. Social engagement and connection may simply be powerful factors for cognitive performance in older age.

Social isolation was found to be a key factor associated with early cognitive decline among Chinese pension plan participants analyzed in the study. Previously retired participants in the program reported lower levels of overall social interaction and engagement compared to age-matched non-retired people, Nikolov said. Thus, this suggests that certain policies can be introduced to mitigate the cognitive harms of early retirement and preserve more general health benefits.

The researchers recommend the introduction of policies aimed at buffering the decline in social activity and mental activity. In this sense, retirement programs can generate a positive impact on the health status of retirees without an associated negative impact on their cognitive abilities.

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By typing text, we give out our emotions 23.10.2014

Our emotions are most easily identified by facial expressions and voice. However, there are as many faces and voices in the world as there are people, and how can we be sure that some kind of emotional grimace in different people expresses the same thing - for example, fear, or joy, or sadness?

In fact, there is no problem for you and me here, our psyche easily copes with the variety of features of someone else's appearance and easily singles out common emotional components in facial expressions. The same thing happens with the voice. However, if we set out to teach a robot to recognize emotions, then we will need clear criteria by which the machine could distinguish fear from joy, and joy from sadness in any of their intensity, with any shades and on any faces.

Researchers from the Islamic University of Technology in Bangladesh chose an original way to solve this problem: they focused not on facial expressions, but on the fingers. The emotion recognition program had to focus on how a person types on the keyboard. In the first part of the experiment, 25 volunteers aged 15 to 40 retyped a piece of text from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, while noting their emotional state: joy, fear, anger, sadness, shame, etc. If certain emotions are not it was, you could choose fatigue or neutral emotions. (It is clear that emotions could be in no way connected with the text, a person could be typing, being influenced by some of his thoughts and feelings.)

In the second part of the experiment, volunteers were already typing something of their own, but every half hour they were reminded of a certain emotion: sadness, shame, fear, joy, and further down the list - they had to enter this emotional state and stay in it while typing. At the same time, a special program collected information about how users click on the keyboard buttons.

In an article in Behavior & Information Technology, the authors of the work write that they managed to identify 19 key parameters that could be used to judge the emotional state of the typist. Among them were, for example, typing speed in an interval of five seconds, and the time during which the key remained pressed. Parameter values measured on free text were compared with standard values for specific emotions and words, which were obtained using Carroll's text. In this way, as the researchers will assure, it is possible to determine seven different emotions with great certainty. Most likely, they succeeded with joy (the correct answer was in 87% of cases) and with anger (the correct answer was in 81% of cases).

Compared to emotion detectors that work with facial expressions and voice intonations, the "printed" method has one noticeable disadvantage: if the emotion on the face and in the voice is manifested directly, then the person must do something - type text. If he does not print, then emotions cannot be determined. So, obviously, this method should work in conjunction with mimic and voice detectors. However, it can also be useful on its own: imagine, for example, an online psychological consultation - in such a situation, a psychologist could obtain information about the patient’s emotional state only by his typing style, and at the same time compare how much a person’s emotions correspond to the content of the messages he typed.

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