Mentally Challenging Jobs Promote Cognitive Benefits Later in Life

Amy Taylor March 27, 2014

Even though mentally tough jobs can trigger stress issues in a person’s life, new research found that it does have cognitive benefits too.

The study, which lasted for 18 years, suggests that certain kinds of challenging jobs have the potential to enhance and protect workers’ mental functioning later in life. Researchers analysed 4,182 participants in the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study, which in involved 20,000 older Americans every two years.

Participants were interviewed about eight times between 1992 and 2010, starting when they were between the ages of 51 and 61. The interviewers discovered that respondents worked in a wide variety of jobs and had been doing the same type of work for more than 25 years, on average, before they retired.

The researchers then examined the requirements of mentally challenging jobs. These were developing objectives and strategies, making decisions, solving problems, evaluating information, and thinking creatively.

They also assessed participants’ mental functioning, using standard tests of episodic memory and mental status, and controlled for participants’ health, symptoms of depression, economic status and demographic characteristics, including years of education.

The tests included recalling a list of 10 nouns immediately after seeing it and also after a time delay, and counting backwards from 100 by sevens.

The findings, which were published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, suggest that people who had worked in jobs with greater mental demands were more likely to have better memories before they retired and more likely to have slower declines in memory after retiring than people who had worked in jobs with fewer mental demands.

“These results suggest that working in an occupation that requires a variety of mental processes may be beneficial to employees,” said Jessica Faul, Ph.D., an assistant research scientist.

“It’s likely that being exposed to new experiences or more mentally complex job duties may benefit not only newer workers but more seasoned employees as well,” she said.

Whilst the study did not establish causal relations between mental work demands and cognitive change after retirement, it found that people with higher levels of mental functioning picked jobs with more mental demands.

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Mentally Tough Job Provides Cognitive Retirement Benefits