UC San Diego

We investigated subjective cognitive complaints (SCCs), as well as physical and mental health factors, in adults and older adults. U.S. residents (N = 2,962) were recruited via the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform and completed a 90-item survey. Overall, 493/1930 (25.5%) of younger adults and 278/1032 (26.9%) of older adults endorsed SCCs. Analyses revealed worse physical and mental health characteristics in the SCC+ compared to the SCC- group, with primarily medium (Cohen's d = 0.50) to large (0.80) effect sizes. Age did not moderate relationships between SCCs and physical/mental health. Results suggest that SCCs are associated with a diverse set of negative health characteristics such as poor sleep and high body mass index, and lower levels of positive factors, including happiness and wisdom. Effect sizes of psychological correlates were at least as large as those of physical correlates, indicating that mental health is critical to consider when evaluating SCCs.