Korean J Rehabil Nurs.  2002 Dec;5(2):145-155.

A Relationship between Depression and The metamemory and Memory Performance in Elderly Women

• Min HS

Abstract

PURPOSE: This study tries to analyze the differences of memory performance and the metamemory of the elderly women according to degree of depression. And also it attempts to find the correlations among the sub-concepts of metamemory which have close relationships to the memory performance followed by the depression.
Methods
The subjects of this study are 60 the elderly women who are older than sixty years in Busan city, Korea. We use the MIA (Dixon, et al., 1988) to measure metamemory and measure the memory performances such as the immeadiate word recall. the delayed word recall, the word recognition task, and face recognition.
RESULTS
1. The average point of deprssed elderly womens' metamemory was significantly lower than non-depressed womens' point(t=10.86 p .0017), Looking into subconcept of metamemory, depressed elderly womens' strategy, capacity, change. achievement point were significantly lower than non-depressed women. 2. In terms of immediate word recall and delayed word recall performances, depressed elderly women are significantly lower than non-depressed elderly women. 3. The degree of depressed elderly womens' metamemory(strategy, achievement, change, capacity) has significant correlations with immediate word recall performances.
CONCLUSION
Metamemory has close relationship with the memory performance of elderly women. And also depressed elderly's sub-concepts of metamemory which have influences on their memory performance are different from non-depressed elderly's sub-concepts. Therefore, when we try to develop some programs to prevent memory decrease of elderly women, we should take these point into consideration.

MeSH Terms

Aged*
Busan
Depression*
Female
Humans
Korea
Memory*