Peng Siyun, Roth Adam R, Perry Brea L
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Department of Sociology & Network Science Institute, Indiana University.
Soc Neurosci. 2021 Dec;16(6):684-694. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2021.2001368. Epub 2021 Nov 11.
Access to cognitive stimulation through social interactions is a key mechanism used to explain the association between personal networks, cognitive health, and brain structure in older adults. However, little research has assessed how best to operationalize access to novel or diverse social stimuli using social network measures, many of which were designed to study information diffusion within large whole networks (e.g., structural holes and bridging social capital). Using data from 277 adults in the Social Networks and Alzheimer Disease (SNAD) study, we aimed to evaluate such measures for use in research on cognitive aging using personal social networks. We found a positive association between individual measures of structural holes and cognitive health, but not with brain structure. Further, we extracted a latent measure of bridging social capital using multiple individual measures (i.e., structural holes, network diversity, weak ties, and network size) and found it was significantly associated with cognitive health and brain structure, supporting the utility of this concept and related measures in the study of cognitive aging. Finally, individual measures may underestimate the effects of multidimensional bridging social capital on cognitive health and brain structure compared to a latent measure that combines them.
通过社交互动获得认知刺激是用于解释老年人个人网络、认知健康和脑结构之间关联的关键机制。然而，很少有研究评估如何使用社交网络测量方法来最好地实现对新颖或多样社交刺激的获取，其中许多测量方法旨在研究大型整体网络中的信息传播（例如，结构洞和桥接社会资本）。利用社交网络与阿尔茨海默病（SNAD）研究中277名成年人的数据，我们旨在评估这些测量方法在使用个人社交网络进行认知老化研究中的应用。我们发现结构洞个体测量与认知健康之间存在正相关，但与脑结构无关。此外，我们使用多种个体测量方法（即结构洞、网络多样性、弱联系和网络规模）提取了桥接社会资本的潜在测量指标，发现它与认知健康和脑结构显著相关，这支持了这一概念和相关测量方法在认知老化研究中的效用。最后，与将它们结合起来的潜在测量指标相比，个体测量方法可能低估了多维桥接社会资本对认知健康和脑结构的影响。
