Leisure activities and working memory in older age: The mediating roles of affect and cortisol

Leisure activities may protect cognitive performance in older age, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. This study examined the short-term time-lagged associations between leisure activities that are minimally physically active (e.g., meeting friends; hereinafter referred to as "leisure activities") and working memory, and whether affect and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (i.e., cortisol) mediate such associations. We examined 7,928 observations provided by 235 participants (aged 56-88 years, 49% women) from the German socioeconomic panel. Over 7 days, participants reported their leisure activities and affect (i.e., valence and arousal), completed an ambulatory working memory task, and provided saliva samples five times per day. Results from multivariate multilevel time series analyses show that a bout of leisure activity (that happened within the recent 3 hr) was associated with subsequent better working memory performance as captured 6 hr later, but not 3 hr later or at the same time. Moreover, high- and low-arousal positive affect and low-arousal negative affect mediated the temporal association. That is, a bout of leisure activity was associated with concurrent more high- and low-arousal positive affect and less low-arousal negative affect, which were associated with subsequent better working memory performance. In contrast, high-arousal negative affect and cortisol did not mediate the association. In addition, we observed heterogeneity across participants and reported generalizability of our hypothesis on leisure activities that are physically active (e.g., walking). In conclusion, engagement in leisure activities may have short-term benefits for working memory performance by enhancing affective well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).