The Effect of Social Stress and Trust on Cognition and Health in American Adults: A Replication and Extension Study

Declining cognition, physical health, and mental health are common yet major publichealth challenges. However, research connecting declining cognition and health to common social stressors is limited. This paper aims to replicate Lindert et al. (2021), who used the MIDUS data set, a national sample of non-institutionalized, English-speaking respondents aged 25-74 living throughout the United States, to investigate the decline in episodic memory and executive function with social stress variables. The subsequent extension of the original study seeks to predict various physical and mental health outcomes from different community trust variables. In both the replication and extension, multivariate linear regression models were used to analyze the effect of social stressors and trust on cognition and health. We replicated the results reported in the original study, which suggested greater levels of perceived inequality in the family, marital stress, lifetime discrimination, and daily discrimination were significantly associated with more cognitive decline. Additionally, we found that lower levels of trust in neighbors and friends, as well as having few trusting relationships, were significantly associated with worse physical and mental health in both men and women