Affiliations: [a] Laboratoire de Psychologie des Pays de la Loire (EA 4638), Université de Nantes, Nantes, France
| [b] Unité de Gériatrie, Centre Hospitalier de Tourcoing, Tourcoing, France
| [c] Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France
| [d] Université de Lille, CNRS, CHU Lille, UMR 9193 - SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, Lille, France
| [e] School of Social Sciences and Psychology & Marcs Institute for Brain and Behaviour, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia
Correspondence:
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Correspondence to: Mohamad El Haj, Faculté de Psychologie, LPPL – Laboratoire de Psychologie des Pays de la Loire, Université de Nantes, Chemin de la Censive du Tertre, BP 81227, 44312 Nantes Cedex 3, France. E-mail: mohamad.elhaj@univ-nantes.fr.
Abstract: We investigated, for the first time, how people with mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD) reflect on continuity of their self (i.e., whether they are the same person they were before). We invited people with mild AD and control participants to conduct The Thinking about Life Experiences (TALE) Scale. More specifically, we invited participants to indicate whether they think about their life story: when they want to feel that they are the same person that they were before (Item 1), when they are concerned about whether they are still the same type of person that they were earlier (Item 2), when they are concerned about whether their values have changed over time (Item 3), when they are concerned about whether their beliefs have changed over time (Item 4), and when they want to understand how they have changed from who they were before (Item 5). The scores of people with AD and control participants on the items of the TALE scale were similar, except for the first item on which people with AD provided higher scores than did control participants. As demonstrated by scores on Item 1, people with mild AD can retrieve autobiographical memories to reflect on situations in which they want to feel that they are the same person that they were before. In other words, people with mild AD can draw on their personal and meaningful events to maintain a continuous sense of self or even to reflect on situations in which they are concerned about their self-continuity.
