Lifelong Learning and Emotional Skills Keep the Ageing Brain Sharp, Twin Studies Find

Two new studies from Italy offer a compelling picture of what helps the human mind stay agile deep into later life, and the answer is not a single pill or a single habit. Researchers at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Trieste examined adults over the age of 65 across a battery of cognitive tasks and found that two distinct but intertwined resources appear to protect mental performance: the cognitive reserve accumulated over decades of education, work, and intellectually engaging leisure, and the emotional skills that govern how we recognize, interpret, and respond to feelings. The findings, published in the journals Neuropsychology and Brain Sciences, suggest that healthy cognitive ageing is not simply a matter of avoiding decline but of drawing on reserves built across an entire lifetime, together with a capacity to harness emotion in the service of thought.

The concept of cognitive reserve has long fascinated neuroscientists. It refers to the set of mental resources that people accumulate through schooling, professional experience, and stimulating hobbies, resources that allow the brain to cope with age-related changes without showing obvious signs of impairment. Two people may carry similar age-related brain changes, yet the one with greater reserve may perform dramatically better on memory, language, and reasoning tasks. The SISSA studies, led from the laboratory of neuroscientist Raffaella Rumiati, put this idea to a rigorous test in older adults, focusing on two capacities that matter enormously in everyday life: the ability to find the right words, and the ability to hold and manipulate information in working memory.

The first study, with Elisabetta Pisanu as first author and published in Neuropsychology, concentrated on language. Verbal fluency, the capacity to retrieve words quickly and express thoughts effectively, is one of the abilities most visibly affected by ageing, and it is traditionally measured by asking people to produce as many words as they can within a minute. The SISSA team took a different approach. They focused on the first ten seconds of the verbal fluency task, the brief window in which word retrieval is fastest and most automatic, before deliberate strategies and compensatory effort begin to shape performance. That narrow slice of time, the researchers found, was already sufficient to reveal the effects of both ageing and cognitive reserve on language.

The results were striking. A decline in word-retrieval performance was detectable within those initial moments in adults over 65, but in individuals with high cognitive reserve the decline was greatly reduced and could even disappear. According to Pisanu, older adults with higher cognitive reserve achieved language performance comparable to that of younger adults, a finding she summarized by noting that cognitive reserve helps keep the brain young, at least when it comes to language and word retrieval. In practical terms, a lifetime of education, intellectually demanding work, and mentally engaging activities appears to buffer the earliest and most automatic stages of language production against the erosion typically associated with age.

Emotion entered the picture in an unexpected way. The researchers observed that not all words are equally easy to retrieve: older adults retrieved words associated with positive emotions more easily than words linked to negative emotions. This emotional valence effect suggests that language performance in later life is not governed by cognitive reserve alone. The affective properties of words themselves contribute to how readily they surface in the mind, hinting at a deep integration between emotional and linguistic processing in the ageing brain. For a field that has often treated emotion as a separate domain from cognition, the finding adds weight to a growing view that the two are inseparable partners in mental life.

The second study, first-authored by Stefania Lucia and published in Brain Sciences, turned to working memory, the mental workspace that allows us to temporarily hold, process, and use information in order to complete a task. Working memory underpins everything from following a conversation to planning a meal, and it tends to become less efficient with age. The researchers wanted to know whether cognitive reserve and emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize, understand, and use emotions to guide thinking, behaviour, and relationships, play different roles depending on whether emotional content is relevant to the task at hand. To find out, they asked adults over 65 to complete a working memory task involving faces, with participants instructed in different conditions to focus either on the emotional expression of the faces or on their age.

The results revealed a clear division of labor. Cognitive reserve enhanced performance accuracy regardless of the experimental condition, indicating that it plays a fundamental role in supporting the ability to maintain and manipulate the information needed to carry out a task, whether or not emotions are involved. Emotional factors, by contrast, shaped performance in a more conditional manner. When the task involved emotional content, older adults performed better and appeared to become more efficient, suggesting that emotionally meaningful material can actually sharpen cognition in later life rather than distract from it.

Emotional intelligence left its signature on how participants processed information and generated responses. People with higher emotional intelligence took longer to respond to emotional stimuli, but the researchers interpret this not as greater difficulty. Instead, they suggest that these individuals devote greater attentional and cognitive resources to processing emotional information, resulting in deeper and more thorough processing. The observation reframes response speed as an ambiguous measure: a slower answer from an emotionally skilled participant may reflect richer engagement with the material rather than cognitive lag. In this way, emotional intelligence appears to influence not just whether older adults succeed at a task, but how they approach it, shaping the very strategy by which information is encoded and acted upon.

Taken together, the two studies deliver a message that is both scientifically precise and socially urgent. Cognitive and emotional resources do not operate independently; they work in concert to support healthier and more efficient cognitive ageing. An intellectually stimulating life, built through education, demanding work, and active leisure, helps preserve a wide range of functions from language to working memory, while emotional skills contribute measurably to the efficiency of cognitive processes. Both studies were carried out as part of Age-It: Ageing Well in an Ageing Society, a major Italian national research programme that has built a research and data infrastructure dedicated to studying ageing from socio-economic, biomedical, and technological perspectives.

The societal stakes are considerable, and Rumiati frames them directly. Italy is one of the world’s longest-lived countries, together with Japan, an extraordinary achievement that nonetheless brings new challenges, because as the older population grows, so does the demand for healthcare and long-term care services. Understanding how to preserve cognitive abilities for as long as possible is therefore essential, both to improve quality of life and to help ensure the sustainability of healthcare and social welfare systems. Rumiati argues that research of this kind contributes in two ways: by improving the methodological tools used to study cognitive ageing, such as the ten-second verbal fluency window that captures automatic word retrieval without the traditional one-minute test, and by identifying the factors that protect cognitive functions as people grow older. The SISSA team regards these as promising results and intends to explore them further in future studies, work that could help transform ageing from a story of inevitable loss into one of accumulated, and recoverable, mental strength.

Subject of Research: Cognitive reserve and emotional intelligence as protective factors in cognitive ageing

Article Title: Healthy aging: Training the mind and emotional skills helps keep the brain healthy

Article References: Healthy aging: Training the mind and emotional skills helps keep the brain healthy. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: cognitive reserve, healthy ageing, working memory, emotional intelligence, verbal fluency, language, older adults, neuropsychology, SISSA, Age-It programme, word retrieval, cognitive decline