{"id":1185,"date":"2020-03-03T11:13:39","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T11:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horizon.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=1185"},"modified":"2020-03-03T11:13:39","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T11:13:39","slug":"social-skills-begin-to-decline-in-late-30s-and-early-40s-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1185\/social-skills-begin-to-decline-in-late-30s-and-early-40s-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"Social skills begin to decline in late 30s and early 40s, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by\u00a0Gareth Willmer<\/h5>\n

Training programmes to improve people\u2019s social and cognitive skills should target people in their late 30s and early 40s as these abilities start to decline earlier than previously thought, according to researchers who are looking at how social abilities change over time.<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s part of a field of work to collect long-term data on how social skills develop \u2013 or weaken \u2013 and what can be done about it. While a wealth of research exists on how humans and other animals socially bond, the difficulty of tracking how this changes over the course of entire lives, or even between generations, means studies on that are rarer.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019ve known until now has often been in \u2018isolated snippets\u2019, says Professor Heather Ferguson, a researcher in cognitive psychology at the University of Kent in the UK. That means it\u2019s been hard to pinpoint exactly when age-related changes in different social skills take place. But as societies age, it is increasingly crucial to know what these changes mean for wellbeing, according to Prof. Ferguson. \u2018Once social abilities decline, people can start to feel lonely and depressed, which can then have a big impact on physical health,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

Prof. Ferguson is principal investigator on\u00a0CogSoCoAGE<\/a>, a wide-ranging project conducting in-depth studies on hundreds of people aged all the way from 10 to 90 years to see how social skills change over time. \u2018It\u2019s basically a huge \u201cbattery\u201d of assessments to look at different aspects of social and cognitive skills in a really diverse way,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

These cover both lab tests and real-world interactions, ranging from questionnaires to measurements of brain activity and eye movements using glasses fitted with video cameras. Prof. Ferguson is currently repeating tests with people who first did them a couple of years ago to see if there are any changes over time.<\/p>\n

One of the key focuses of CogSoCoAGE is to assess the link, as we age, between social skills based on the ability to infer information about others \u2013 termed theory of mind \u2013 and more general cognitive skills known as executive functions that involve control of behaviours.<\/p>\n

Old age<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prof. Ferguson\u2019s team has already found that a decline in certain social and related cognitive functions, such as memory, planning and the ability to inhibit impulses, actually begins much earlier than generally thought \u2013 in one\u2019s late 30s and early 40s, rather than in old age.<\/p>\n

\u2018(Our results suggest that) if there are training programmes developed (to improve cognitive abilities or well-being), they should be starting earlier than old age,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

From tracking eye movements, the team found that in one-to-one conversations, older adults tend to spend less time looking at the other person\u2019s face and, instead, look at the background \u2013 indicating difficulty engaging with demanding social information.<\/p>\n

\u2018That\u2019s quite important, because if you\u2019re not looking at someone\u2019s face, you\u2019re missing a huge amount of cues about their meaning, intentions and emotions,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Prof. Ferguson says that older adults tend to spend less time looking at other people when walking around in the everyday world, which could make them less able to interact with others. \u2018They\u2019re sort of subtle differences in the way you experience life that can have a massive impact on opportunities to engage in social interaction,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

So far, the overall results are, perhaps unsurprisingly, complex. Social abilities that rely less on memory or inhibitory skills \u2013 such as the ability to understand someone else\u2019s viewpoint \u2013 see no decline with age, while others \u2013 such as empathy for physical pain \u2013 actually show an improvement, says Prof. Ferguson. Conversely, empathy for social pain reduces with age.<\/p>\n

The researchers\u2019 studies also looked at whether it\u2019s possible to train underlying cognitive skills to enhance social abilities. They found that any improvement in one type of task had limited correlation with improvements in others.<\/p>\n

The project findings could eventually lead to more tailored programmes and apps for well-being, says Prof. Ferguson. At the same time, she says, it should be kept in mind that altering one type of social interaction could also have unanticipated effects on others. In fact, negative impacts could arise from measures such as forcing a person to look at someone else\u2019s face if they find that hard when interacting.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Once social abilities decline, people can start to feel lonely and depressed, which can then have a big impact on physical health.\u2019<\/p>\n

Prof. Heather Ferguson, University of Kent, UK<\/p>\n

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Adolescence<\/strong><\/p>\n

When looking at someone\u2019s lifespan, one particularly defining period is adolescence. While it\u2019s easy to imagine that adolescent experiences can affect your social behaviour as an adult, could your experiences as an adolescent also affect the social skills of your children?<\/p>\n

This is something Dr Tina Kretschmer, a behavioural and social scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, is exploring in a project that she leads called\u00a0CAPE<\/a>. Through it, she is investigating the impact of adolescent social relationships on adult ones.<\/p>\n

Dr Kretschmer says that the idea for CAPE stemmed partly from watching a\u00a0TV programme called\u00a0The Secret Life of 4 Year Olds<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0The programme showed how different children at that age already act and integrate very differently into social situations and form hierarchies \u2013 suggesting there\u2019s ingrained behaviour even before preschool age.<\/p>\n

She got to thinking about how much kids\u2019 social interactions might be affected by parental influence and how much by genetics, and what the long-term effects might be. \u2018We see already at that age that some children are outsiders and some are more popular, but we don\u2019t know how it gets there,\u2019 said Dr Kretschmer.<\/p>\n

She is building on the extensive data from the\u00a0TRAILS<\/a>\u00a0study, run by a group of researchers from different Dutch universities since 2001, tracking a range of social, psychological and biological information at regular intervals on more than 2,500 young people since the age of 11. Now nearing 30, these former adolescents have themselves started having children, who are being included in the follow-on study,\u00a0TRAILS Next<\/a>.<\/p>\n

CAPE is carrying out a variety of interviews and interaction tasks with participants in these initiatives, looking not only into intergenerational effects but also how the parents\u2019 own social experiences in adolescence have affected their relationships in later life. This also includes collecting DNA to test genetic transmission of certain traits.<\/p>\n

In addition, Dr Kretschmer\u2019s team is planning tests using radio frequency identification, or RFID, trackers to examine how young children interact with each other at a party. These could be used to track, for instance, how long children spend alone, in pairs and in larger groups.<\/p>\n

With CAPE currently in the data-collection phase, there are no results yet; however, the team will begin analysing the data later this year.<\/p>\n

Dr Kretschmer says the aim will be to ultimately answer questions such as: does genetic predisposition towards social anxiety help explain why both a parent and their child have been bullied at school?\u00a0 Or is this more influenced by a parent who previously experienced bullying becoming overprotective? \u2018We\u2019re trying to disentangle that and find out what\u2019s playing which role here,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m so curious to see what it will be. Will it be more genetic or more about parenting? And how will it all play together?\u2019<\/p>\n

The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Gareth Willmer Training programmes to improve people\u2019s social and cognitive skills should target people in their late 30s and early 40s as these abilities start to decline earlier than previously thought, according to researchers who are looking at how social abilities change over time. It\u2019s part of a field of work to collect long-term data … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":1186,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences"],"yoast_head":"\nSocial skills begin to decline in late 30s and early 40s, study finds - Horizon Magazine Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1185\/social-skills-begin-to-decline-in-late-30s-and-early-40s-study-finds\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Social skills begin to decline in late 30s and early 40s, study finds\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by\u00a0Gareth Willmer Training programmes to improve people\u2019s social and cognitive skills should target people in their late 30s and early 40s as these abilities start to decline earlier than previously thought, according to researchers who are looking at how social abilities change over time. 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