Painting a Pretty Picture: The Role of Social Desirability in the Memory Self-Efficacy of Young and Older Adults

The current study examined the relationships between social desirability, depression, memory self-efficacy, and objective memory in both young and older adult populations. I designed the study to replicate the previous findings of Lineweaver and Brolsma (2014) and to determine whether these findings would generalize to individuals in later adulthood. 45 young adults and 47 older adults (young adults: 88% female, 80% White; older adults: 42% female, 100% White) completed measures of depression, objective memory, memory self-efficacy, and social desirability. As predicted, older adults were higher in levels of social desirability than young adults, but the memory self-efficacy of young adults was more closely related to social desirability than that of the older age demographic. While social desirability did not mediate the relationship between depression and memory self-efficacy, significant support was found for its mediation of the relationship between objective memory and memory self-efficacy in both young and older adult populations. Together, these results indicate that social desirability exerts influence on the memory self-perceptions of both young and older adult populations and taking social desirability into account may improve the accuracy of memory self-reports in healthcare settings