Social and leisure engagement moderates the association between care partner distress and cognitive status of care recipients with dementia.

Objectives: Despite the established impact of care recipient cognitive impairment on care partner (CP) distress, limited quantitative research has explored how social and leisure engagement may moderate this relationship, offering a potential avenue for enhancing well-being in both care partners and recipients. The current study therefore examined the between- and within-dyad associations between cognitive impairment of persons with dementia (PwD) and their family CP's distress, and whether social and leisure activity moderated this relationship.

Methods: Data were utilized from dyads (PwD, n = 33, and their CPs, n = 34) engaged in the Voices in Motion project, a social-cognitive choral intervention for PwD and their family CPs. Measures indexing PwD cognitive status, CP distress, and PwD and CP social and leisure engagement were assessed using an intensive repeated-measures burst design, with multilevel models of change employed to disaggregate between- and within-person effects.

Results: Diminished cognitive functioning in PwD was associated with increased CP distress (p < 0.01) between-dyads; however, this relationship was not significant within-dyads. The between-dyad association was significantly moderated by the extent of social and leisure engagement of both CPs (p < .001) and PwD (p = .04). Follow-up simple slopes demonstrated that, at mean- and high-levels (+1SD) of social and leisure engagement for PwD and/or CP, increased PwD cognitive function significantly predicted lower CP distress.

Conclusion: The significant moderating influence of social and leisure engagement of dyads underscores the protective role of such engagement for reducing care-related distress. Activity engagement for CPs and PwD may help modulate the deleterious impact of PwD cognitive impairment and attenuate CP distress. These findings highlight the potential for dyadic interventions that promote social and leisure activities to mitigate caregiving challenges and enhance quality of life for both CPs and PwD.