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Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health

BACKGROUND: Socially desirable responding is a potentially relevant issue in older adults and can be evaluated with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS). However, the eight-item MCSDS has never been specifically administered to geriatric subjects, and there is a dearth of literature...

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Autores principales: Nicolini, Paola, Abbate, Carlo, Inglese, Silvia, Mari, Daniela, Rossi, Paolo D., Cesari, Matteo
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8442330/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34525955
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-021-02435-z
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author Nicolini, Paola
Abbate, Carlo
Inglese, Silvia
Mari, Daniela
Rossi, Paolo D.
Cesari, Matteo
author_facet Nicolini, Paola
Abbate, Carlo
Inglese, Silvia
Mari, Daniela
Rossi, Paolo D.
Cesari, Matteo
author_sort Nicolini, Paola
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Socially desirable responding is a potentially relevant issue in older adults and can be evaluated with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS). However, the eight-item MCSDS has never been specifically administered to geriatric subjects, and there is a dearth of literature on the relationship between social desirability and cognitive impairment. Also, the connection between social desirability and subjective measures of psychological well-being is a matter of controversy. This study has three main aims. First, to determine the psychometric properties of the eight-item MCSDS in geriatric outpatients without dementia (i.e. with normal cognition (NC) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI)). Second, to investigate the link between social desirability and cognitive functioning. Third, to determine the association between social desirability and the assessment of self-reported mental health. METHODS: Community-dwelling outpatients (aged ≥ 65) were consecutively recruited and neuropsychologically tested to diagnose NC or MCI (n = 299). Social desirability was assessed with the eight-item MCSDS. Depressive and anxiety symptoms were measured with the short Geriatric Depression (GDS-s) and the State-Trait Personality Inventory Trait Anxiety (STPI-TA) scales. RESULTS: On principal components analysis, the eight-item MCSDS was found to have a multidimensional structure. Of the initial three-component solution, only two subscales had acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.6): “Acceptance of responsibility” and “Integrity”. The third subscale (“Kindness towards others”) appeared to gauge two distinct constructs of formal (i.e. politeness) versus substantive (i.e. forgiveness) compassion. On binary logistic regression, only higher income was a significant predictor of formal compassion. Test-retest reliability was substantial to excellent (Gwet’s AC2 ≥ 0.8). There were no meaningful differences in social desirability between the NC and MCI groups. Likewise, negative Spearman’s correlations between social desirability and cognitive Z-scores across the whole sample were weak (r(s) < |0.3|) and confined to one MCSDS item. Although social desirability was an independent predictor of the STPI-TA score in multiple linear regression, it explained only a marginal amount of incremental variance in anxiety symptoms (less than 2%). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that social desirability need not be a major concern when using questionnaires to assess mental health in geriatric outpatients without dementia. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12877-021-02435-z.
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spelling pubmed-84423302021-09-15 Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health Nicolini, Paola Abbate, Carlo Inglese, Silvia Mari, Daniela Rossi, Paolo D. Cesari, Matteo BMC Geriatr Research Article BACKGROUND: Socially desirable responding is a potentially relevant issue in older adults and can be evaluated with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS). However, the eight-item MCSDS has never been specifically administered to geriatric subjects, and there is a dearth of literature on the relationship between social desirability and cognitive impairment. Also, the connection between social desirability and subjective measures of psychological well-being is a matter of controversy. This study has three main aims. First, to determine the psychometric properties of the eight-item MCSDS in geriatric outpatients without dementia (i.e. with normal cognition (NC) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI)). Second, to investigate the link between social desirability and cognitive functioning. Third, to determine the association between social desirability and the assessment of self-reported mental health. METHODS: Community-dwelling outpatients (aged ≥ 65) were consecutively recruited and neuropsychologically tested to diagnose NC or MCI (n = 299). Social desirability was assessed with the eight-item MCSDS. Depressive and anxiety symptoms were measured with the short Geriatric Depression (GDS-s) and the State-Trait Personality Inventory Trait Anxiety (STPI-TA) scales. RESULTS: On principal components analysis, the eight-item MCSDS was found to have a multidimensional structure. Of the initial three-component solution, only two subscales had acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.6): “Acceptance of responsibility” and “Integrity”. The third subscale (“Kindness towards others”) appeared to gauge two distinct constructs of formal (i.e. politeness) versus substantive (i.e. forgiveness) compassion. On binary logistic regression, only higher income was a significant predictor of formal compassion. Test-retest reliability was substantial to excellent (Gwet’s AC2 ≥ 0.8). There were no meaningful differences in social desirability between the NC and MCI groups. Likewise, negative Spearman’s correlations between social desirability and cognitive Z-scores across the whole sample were weak (r(s) < |0.3|) and confined to one MCSDS item. Although social desirability was an independent predictor of the STPI-TA score in multiple linear regression, it explained only a marginal amount of incremental variance in anxiety symptoms (less than 2%). CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that social desirability need not be a major concern when using questionnaires to assess mental health in geriatric outpatients without dementia. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12877-021-02435-z. BioMed Central 2021-09-15 /pmc/articles/PMC8442330/ /pubmed/34525955 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-021-02435-z Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Nicolini, Paola
Abbate, Carlo
Inglese, Silvia
Mari, Daniela
Rossi, Paolo D.
Cesari, Matteo
Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health
title Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health
title_full Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health
title_fullStr Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health
title_full_unstemmed Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health
title_short Socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health
title_sort socially desirable responding in geriatric outpatients with and without mild cognitive impairment and its association with the assessment of self-reported mental health
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8442330/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34525955
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-021-02435-z
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