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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2023 Jul 1.
Published in final edited form as: Pers Individ Dif. 2022 Sep 7;200:111874. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2022.111874

Sense of Purpose in Life and Subjective Cognitive Failures

Angelina R Sutin 1, Damaris Aschwanden 1, Martina Luchetti 1, Yannick Stephan 2, Antonio Terracciano 1
PMCID: PMC9988243  NIHMSID: NIHMS1834009  PMID: 36891529

Abstract

A greater sense of purpose in life is an aspect of well-being associated with markers of cognitive health across adulthood, including subjective cognition. The current research extends this work to examine how purpose is associated with cognitive failures, which are momentary lapses in cognitive function, whether this association varies by age, sex, race, or education, and whether it is accounted for by depressed affect. Adults across the United States (N=5,100) reported on their sense of purpose in life, recent cognitive failures in four domains (memory, distractibility, blunders, names), and depressed affect. Purpose was associated with fewer cognitive failures overall and within each domain (median d=.30, p<.01), controlling for sociodemographic covariates. These associations were similar across sex, education, and racial groups but were stronger at relatively older than younger ages. Depressed affect accounted for all the association between purpose and cognitive failures among adults younger than 50; the association was reduced by half but remained significant among participants 50 and older. Purpose was associated with fewer cognitive failures, especially in the second half of adulthood. Purpose may be a psychological resource that helps support subjective cognition among relatively older adults, even after accounting for depressed affect.

Keywords: Purpose in life, Subjective cognition, Cognitive failures, Age moderation, Depressed affect

A sense of purpose in life is defined as the feeling that one’s life is goal-oriented, driven, and has direction (Ryff, 1995). It has been associated consistently with better health outcomes across adulthood (McKnight & Kashdan, 2009) and was highlighted recently as an important psychological factor that supports better cognitive aging (Sutin, Luchetti, & Terracciano, 2021). Specifically, a greater sense of purpose is associated with better cognitive health across the spectrum of dementia risk: Individuals who perceive greater purpose tend to perform better on cognitive tasks (Lewis et al., 2017), are at lower risk of developing pre-dementia syndromes (Sutin, Luchetti, Stephan, et al., 2021), are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD; Boyle et al., 2010) or dementia (Sutin et al., 2018), and, even after onset, have fewer behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (Sutin, Luchetti, et al., 2021).

One component of cognitive health on this continuum of dementia risk is subjective cognition. Subjective cognition is the individual’s own perception of their cognitive function (McWhirter et al., 2020). It includes how individuals perceive their memory, ability to think clearly, and to learn new things. Such perceptions are emerging as a critical aspect of cognitive health (Jessen et al., 2014). Subjective cognitive decline (perceived decline in the absence of a measured objective impairment, as defined by Jessen et al., 2014), for example, is associated with greater risk of developing an objective cognitive impairment over time (Pike et al., 2021). Such subjective perceptions may pick up subtle changes in cognitive function in daily life that are not yet detectable on objective cognitive tasks.

Cognitive failures are an aspect of subjective cognition that reflect minor cognitive lapses that occur in everyday life (Broadbent et al., 1982). Cognitive failures can take several forms and have been organized into four broad domains: memory, distractibility, blunders, and names (Wallace et al., 2002). Memory failures refer to forgetfulness in daily life (e.g., forgetting scheduled appointments). Distractibility refers to daydreaming and other lapses in attention (e.g., needing to reread what was just read, starting one activity then switching to another). Blunders refers to failures of motor function (e.g., dropping things or bumping into people). Name failures refer to memory forgetfulness as specifically applied to names (i.e., forgetting names or forgetting that a specific person had been met before when meeting again).

Purpose has been associated with subjective cognition. Purpose and meaning in life, for example, have been associated with better perceived memory function (Dewitte et al., 2020), less subjective cognitive decline (Wingo et al., 2020), and fewer cognitive complaints (Steinberg et al., 2013). Purpose has also been associated with lower risk of developing motoric cognitive risk syndrome (Sutin, Luchetti, Stephan, et al., 2021), in which poor subjective cognition is a critical component (Verghese et al., 2013). Missing from this literature, however, is whether purpose is associated with specific types of lapses in cognition.

Much of the work on purpose and subjective cognition has focused on middle-aged and older adults. Yet, somewhat counterintuitively, studies have found that cognitive failures tend to be either unrelated to age (Könen & Karbach, 2018) or are more common in younger than older adulthood (Sutin et al., 2020). This pattern suggests that cognitive failures are not a direct indication of objective cognition, as cognitive function tends to decline with age. Such failures, for example, can occur because of stress, tiredness, low mood, etc. that is not tied specifically to age (Broadbent et al., 1982). As such, the association between purpose in life and cognitive failures may be different at different ages because the underlying reason for the cognitive failures may change with age (e.g., stress versus objective cognitive decline).

Depression is a significant correlate of cognitive failures: Individuals suffering from depression tend to have more lapses in cognition in daily life (Sullivan & Payne, 2007). Even at subclinical levels, depressed affect is associated with more cognitive failures (Hohman et al., 2011). Depressed affect has been found to account for some of the relation between psychological factors, specifically personality traits, and cognitive failures (Sutin et al., 2020). Given that sense of purpose is also associated with depression (purpose tends to be protective against the development of depression; Laird et al., 2019), an association with cognitive failures may be due, in part, to elevated depressed affect associated with lower purpose. Further, the experience of depressed affect tends to change across adulthood (Sutin et al., 2013), which may contribute to differences in the association between purpose and cognitive failures at different ages.

The present study examines the association between sense of purpose in life and cognitive failures in a relatively large sample that covers most of the adult lifespan. We further examine whether this association varies with age and whether this association holds controlling for depressed affect. We expect that a greater sense of purpose will be associated with fewer perceived cognitive failures overall and within each domain of failures (memory, distractibility, blunders, names) and that the shared association with depressed affect will account for some of this association. We do not have a specific prediction about how the association may vary by age; this analysis is exploratory. In addition to age, we also test whether the association between purpose and cognitive failures is moderated by sex, race, and education. As with age, these analyses are exploratory and included to determine whether the associations are similar or vary across demographic groups. Although there is no literature or theoretical reasons to expect differences, it is important to test empirically whether associations vary systematically across groups.

Method

Participants and Procedure

Participants were part of an internet study on the relation between psychological factors and health. To be eligible for participation, individuals had to be ≥18 years and living in the United States. The sample was recruited through a proprietary panel from Survey Sampling International (SSI) and was stratified by sex, age, and race such that sex was 50/50, with roughly the same percentage of participants (20%) in five age bands (18–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, and 60+ years), and Black participants were oversampled relative to population estimates (20%). SSI contacted participants and directed them to a Qualtrics survey administered by the research team. Ethical approval for this study was provided by the local Institutional Review Board (#2014.12239); all participants consented before starting the survey. A total of 5,100 participants completed the purpose in life, cognitive failures, and depressed affect measures and had information on relevant sociodemographic factors to be included in the analysis.

Measures

Purpose in life.

A single item was used to measure a sense of purpose in life (Diener et al., 2009): I lead a purposeful and meaningful life. Participants rated this item on a scale from 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree). Single-item measures of purpose are common in studies where time is limited, and a similar item has been found to have good construct validity and predictive power (Polenick et al., 2018; Polenick et al., 2019). In the cognitive domain, in particular, this item has been shown to have similar cognitive correlates as longer scales, such as the purpose in life subscale of the Ryff Measures of Psychological Well-Being, for aspects of cognitive function (Sutin, Luchetti, Stephan, et al., 2022) and risk of cognitive impairment (Sutin, Aschwanden, et al., 2021).

Cognitive failures.

Cognitive failures were measured with the 25-item Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ; Broadbent et al., 1982). The instructions were: “The following questions are about minor mistakes that everyone makes from time to time, but some of which happen more often than others. We want to know how often these things have happened to you in the past 6 months.” Items were rated from 1 (never) to 5 (very often). The items were averaged into a total score (alpha=.96). Four subscales were also scored (Wallace et al., 2002): Memory (e.g., “Do you find that you forget appointments?”), Distractibility (e.g., “Do you read something and find that you haven’t been thinking about it and must read it again?”), Blunders (e.g., “Do you bump into people?”) and Names (e.g., “Do you find that you forget people’s names?”). The CFQ has been found to have good psychometric properties (Bridger et al., 2013). The total score has good predictive validity for psychological outcomes (Goodman et al., 2022).

Depressed affect.

The Patient Health Questionnaire-2 (PHQ-2) was used to measure depressed affect (Kroenke et al., 2003). Participants rated two items (“Over the last two weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems:” “Little interest or pleasure in doing things?” and “Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?”) on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 3 (nearly everyday). The items were summed and categorized to indicate elevated (≥3) versus not elevated (<3) depressed affect. Note that this threshold is one suggested by Kroenke and colleagues (2003) as a marker of elevated symptomology and should not be considered interchangeable with a diagnosis of major depression.

Covariates.

Participants reported their age in years, sex (0=male, 1=female), race (categorized into four dummy-coded variables: 1=Black, 1=Asian, 1=Multiracial, 1=Otherwise identified, with white as the reference category), and education on a scale from 1 (less than high school) to 6 (PhD or equivalent).

Analytic Approach

Linear regression was used to examine the association between sense of purpose and cognitive failures. Specifically, the total CFQ score and each CFQ subscale were regressed on purpose in life in separate regressions, controlling for the sociodemographic characteristics (Model 1). We then examined the associations by age in two ways: when the sample was split into two age groups (<50 versus ≥50 years old) and by testing for an interaction between purpose and continuous age on the entire sample. Age was divided at 50 because some cognitive functions start to decline in the 50s (Salthouse, 2019) and because AD neuropathology for individuals at risk for AD is apparent in this decade of life (Jack et al., 2015). We further tested whether there was an interaction between purpose and the other sociodemographic characteristics (sex, race, education) on cognitive failures. Finally, we added the PHQ-2 as an additional covariate to evaluate whether the association between purpose and cognitive failures was due to elevated depressed affect. Significance was set to p<.01 because of the large sample size and number of tests.

Results

Descriptive statistics for all study variables are in Table 1. Correlations between study variables are shown in Supplemental Table S1. Table 2 (Model 1) shows the association between purpose and cognitive failures: A greater sense of purpose in life was associated with fewer cognitive failures overall (d=.30) and with fewer cognitive failures in the four specific domains (memory [d=.28], distractibility [d=.30], blunders [d=.30], names [d=.22]), controlling for the sociodemographic covariates.

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics for All Study Variables

Variable Mean (SD) or % (n)
Age (years) 44.65 (15.25)
Age (≥50 years) 38.5% (1965)
Sex (females) 49.6% (2532)
Race (Black) 20.2% (1029)
Race (Asian) 4.5% (227)
Race (multiracial) 2.8% (144)
Race (otherwise identified) 2.3% (117)
Race (white) 70.2% (3583)
Education 3.54 (1.28)
Purpose in life 3.96 (1.02)
Cognitive failures 2.28 (.80)
 Memory 2.03 (.87)
 Distractibility 2.44 (.83)
 Blunders 2.20 (.83)
 Names 2.69 (1.07)
Depressed affect 24.1% (1231)
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Note. N=5,100. SD=standard deviation. Education is reported on a scale from 1 (less than high school) to 6 (PhD or equivalent).

Table 2.

Association between Purpose in Life and Cognitive Failures

Cognitive Failures
Total Memory Distractibility Blunders Names
Model 1
 Full sample −.15* −.14* −.15* −.15* −.11*
 <50 years old −.12* −.10* −.12* −.12* −.07*
 ≥50 years old −.27* −.23* −.25* −.26* −.20*
Model 2
 Full sample −.04* −.02 −.04* −.04* −.04*
 <50 years old −.02 −.01 −.02 −.02 .00
 ≥50 years old −.14* −.11* −.13* −.14* −.13*
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Note. N=5,100. Coefficients are standardized beta coefficients. Model 1 included age, sex, race, and education as covariates; Model 2 included Model 1 covariates and depressed affect.

*

p<.01.

We next tested whether the association between purpose and cognitive failures was moderated by the sociodemographic factors. There was a negative association between age and the CFQ (r=−.24, p<.01; Table S1), which indicated that younger participants reported more cognitive failures. Further, there was evidence that the association between purpose and cognitive failures varied by age. Although apparent in both age groups, the negative association was approximately double the size in magnitude in the 50 and older age group compared to the younger than 50 age group. The interaction analysis using continuous age was consistent with this difference for total CFQ (βpurpose × age=−.04, p<.01), memory (βpurpose × age=−.04, p<.01), distractibility (βpurpose × age=−.04, p<.01) and names (βpurpose × age=−.05, p<.01) but not blunders (βpurpose × age=−.03, p=.016). The association between sense of purpose and cognitive failures (both the total score and the four domains) was not moderated by sex, race, or education, which indicated that the negative association was similar for males and females, Black, Asian, multiracial, and otherwise identified participants compared to white participants, and across the range of education (all interactions p>.01).

The association between purpose and cognitive failures was reduced substantially when depressed affect was included as a covariate (Table 2, Model 2): the associations with the total CFQ and the subscales were attenuated by more than half, with the association between purpose and memory failures reduced to non-significance. A slightly different pattern emerged when the sample was split by age. There was no association between purpose and cognitive failures in the younger age group, but there was a significant association in the older age group, although about half the magnitude as when not controlling for elevated depressed affect.

Discussion

The present research examined the association between a sense of purpose in life and multiple aspects of cognitive failures in a relatively large sample that covered most of the adult lifespan. Consistent with the literature on purpose and cognitive health (Sutin, Luchetti, & Terracciano, 2021), a greater sense of purpose was associated with fewer cognitive failures. This association was stronger among relatively older adults and only remained significant controlling for elevated depressed affect among adults over the age of 50.

A sense of purpose in life is the feeling that one’s life is goal-oriented and driven (Ryff, 1995) and is one component of a meaningful life (Martela & Steger, 2016). A greater sense of purpose is associated with better health outcomes across adulthood (McKnight & Kashdan, 2009) and specifically with better cognitive outcomes in older adulthood (Sutin, Aschwanden, et al., 2021). Along the continuum of subjective cognitive health, higher purpose has been associated with better perceived memory (Dewitte et al., 2020) and lower risk of motoric cognitive risk syndrome (Sutin, Luchetti, Stephan, et al., 2021). The present research extends this literature by demonstrating that a greater sense of purpose is likewise associated with an additional aspect of subjective cognition – fewer cognitive failures, with an effect size of similar magnitude to other psychological factors (Aschwanden et al., 2020). This association was similar across the four domains of cognitive failures, which suggests that purpose has a broad protective association that is not specific to one type of cognitive lapse.

One core component of a sense of purpose in life is to follow through on one’s goal strivings (McKnight & Kashdan, 2009). Fewer cognitive failures may be one factor that facilitates these strivings. In the present research, for example, purpose was associated with not getting distracted in daily life. This greater ability to focus attention and not get distracted may keep individuals higher in purpose on track to accomplish their goals. Their better memory for names and remembering who they have met may also help support the greater social integration and lower risk of loneliness (Sutin, Luchetti, Aschwanden, et al., 2022) associated with greater purpose. As such, fewer cognitive failures may be one mechanism for why purpose is associated with better outcomes in a variety of domains.

There was a stronger association between purpose in life and cognitive failures with age. Purpose in life was associated with fewer cognitive failures among relatively older than relatively younger participants, both when testing age as a continuous moderator and when testing separate age groups. This pattern may be driven by age differences in the reporting of cognitive failures (e.g., overreporting at younger age may dilute the association with purpose) and/or the role of depressive symptoms especially at younger ages. In contrast to age, there was no evidence that the association was moderated by the other sociodemographic characteristics. Specifically, the negative association was similar across sex, racial groups, and level of education. This pattern is consistent with related work on the health outcomes associated with purpose that shows that purpose has a protective effect across populations (Czekierda et al., 2017; Sutin, Aschwanden, et al., 2021) but suggests that purpose is more relevant for cognitive lapses at relatively older ages.

Controlling for elevated depressed affect reduced the magnitude of the association between purpose and cognitive failures by about half for participants 50 and older and reduced the association to non-significance among participants younger than 50. This reduction is consistent with other literature that suggests that depressed affect accounts for some of the association between psychological factors, such as personality, and cognitive failures (Sutin et al., 2020). From the present study and the literature, the exact role of depressed affect in the relation between purpose and cognitive failures is not clear. Depressed affect, for example, could confound the association, which would indicate that the relation between purpose and cognitive failures is due to shared overlap with elevated depressed affect. It is also possible, however, that depressed affect could be a mechanism of this association. Specifically, purpose predicts the development of incident depression: individuals lower in purpose are at greater risk of developing depression (Laird et al., 2019). As such, elevated depressed affect could be a mediator of the relation between purpose and cognitive failures. It was not possible to disentangle these two possibilities with the cross-sectional, correlational data used in the present study.

The present study had several strengths, including a relatively large sample with good age representation across the adult lifespan that was also relatively diverse in terms of race. It also had a detailed measure of cognitive failures. Practical implications include the use of purpose to identify who is most at risk for cognitive failures. These individuals may benefit from interventions that aim to maintain cognition and psychological well-being. The findings further suggest differences in how the association is interpreted by age. Specifically, for younger adults with cognitive failures, treatment for depressed affect may be particularly useful for individuals low in purpose, whereas cognitive failures associated with purpose in older adulthood may be more indicative of underlying changes in cognitive functions.

There are limitations that could be addressed in future research. First, the data were cross-sectional. Longitudinal data are needed to examine potential bi-directional relations between purpose and cognitive failures. Second, the data were correlational. Given that purpose is malleable (Burrow et al., 2016; Park et al., 2019), future research could manipulate purpose to test its causal effect on cognitive failures. This approach is particularly important to test mediators of the association, particularly depressed affect (e.g., does increasing purpose lead to less depressed affect, which decreases the frequency of cognitive failures?). Third, the cognitive failures scale measured perceived frequency of these failures over the last six months. Future research could use experience sampling methodologies to measure cognitive failures as they happen in daily life. This methodology would be useful to disentangle the direction of association and depressed affect as a mediator (e.g., feeling more purposeful in the moment leads to feeling less momentary depressed affect that may decrease the frequency of cognitive failures). Future research could address whether purpose is useful for identifying individuals at risk for poor cognitive outcomes, including cognitive failures, and whether deliberately increasing purpose through intervention decreases the experience of cognitive failures, particularly in older adulthood where such failures may be indicative of an impending objective impairment.

In conclusion, the present study contributes to the literature on sense of purpose in life and cognitive health by demonstrating an association between purpose and fewer perceived cognitive failures, especially among relatively older adults.

Supplementary Material

1

Funding:

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01AG074573. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Footnotes

Disclosure of Interest Statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

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