Life Course Religious Attendance and Cognitive Health at Midlife: Exploring Gendered Contingencies

A growing body of literature suggests that religious attendance might mitigate processes of cognitive decline associated with aging. However, few studies have made adequate linkages with the life course perspective. We draw from over 35 years of prospective panel data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (1979–2015) to assess the associations of cumulative exposures to religious attendance over the life course (childhood and midlife) for self-rated cognitive health and working memory (as assessed by the Serial 7s task). Our results suggest that midlife adults who attended religious services consistently between childhood and adulthood had higher self-rated cognitive health and better working memory. Women were also found to receive stronger benefits to self-rated cognitive health from consistent religious practice between childhood and adulthood. This pattern of findings allows for greater reflection into the neural enrichment and neural depletion arguments proposed to explain the religion/cognitive health link in previous research.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Research on Aging

• Publication date

  2023-07-11

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/01640275231188998PMID 37432269
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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