SMC Assessed by Validated Questionnaire
Some (Gilewski and Zelinski 1986 ; Hermann 1982 ) have advocated for more
comprehensive self-report measures and suggest that the relationship between SMC
and objective cognitive performance might differ if specific cognitive tasks were
related to specific types of self-report questions. Studies utilizing validated mea-
sures of SMC and more comprehensive neuropsychological tests suggest that SMC
may not be a unitary concept. In this respect, it is notable that the above-referenced
study in midlife women (Drogos et al. 2013 ) found that SMC measured by the
global question—“How would you rate your memory in terms of the kinds of
problems that you have?”—related to word memory, but word memory was
unrelated to responses on a more comprehensive assessment of SMC, the Memory
Function Questionnaire (MFQ; Gilewski and Zelinski 1988 ). On the MFQ, par-
ticipants rate the frequency with which they experienced a series of memory lapses
on a 7-point Likert scale (1, severe memory problems; 7, no problems). The
questionnaire yielded four subscales. Frequency of Forgetting assessed how often
the participants experience memory failures in 18 situations, Seriousness of
Forgetting assessed how serious the participants consider memory failures in the
same 18 situations, Retrospective Functioning assessed current memory functioning
in relation tofive different points earlier in life (e.g., 5 years ago, 10 years ago), and
Use of Mnemonics assessed how often the participants use eight common memory
aids. In studies of midlife women, SMC, as assessed by the frequency of forgetting
subscale, the Seriousness of Forgetting subscale, and/or the total score of the MFQ,
were significantly associated with attention, verbal learning (initial learning of the
word list), and working memory (the ability to learn information“online”such as
remembering a new telephone number until it is dialed), but not recall of the word
list after a delay (Weber and Mapstone 2009 ; Weber et al. 2012 ; Drogos et al.
2013 ). The other scales on the MFQ (mnemonics usage and retrospective func-
tioning) were unrelated to objective cognitive performance (Weber et al. 2012 ;
Drogos et al. 2013 ). Thus, a more straightforward relationship between SMC and
memory performance appears to be observed when a single question with high face
validity is answered, but a more comprehensive questionnaire with high content
validity (i.e., measuring broader aspects of memory function) reveals relationships
with other aspects of cognition that relate to memory, such as attention, or learning
of new information. It is also notable that all of these measures of SMC were related
to symptoms of depression, anxiety, and negative affect. Those psychological
factors might help to explain why women’s worry about their memory performance
is sometimes dissociable from their actual memory performance.
Other studies using more comprehensive tools to measure SMC have failed tofind
associations with objective performance. For instance, a cross-sectional study of 292
healthy individuals, aged 18–87 years, measured SMC with the Subjective Memory
Complaints (SMC, Schmand et al. 1996 ) Scale, which included 10 items regarding
difficulties in everyday memory tasks. SMC were unrelated to verbal memory per-
formance and instead were predicted by depressive symptoms (Mendes et al. 2008 ).
282 M.T. Weber and P.M. Maki