A Library of Old Photos Supporting Conversation of Two Generations Serving Reminiscence Therapy

In Japan, a shift in family patterns has led to a sense of social isolation among older people, which increases the risk of major neurocognitive disorder. Interventions for them using old photos to implement reminiscence therapy (RT) have been proved to be effective. A super-aged society has in turn led to a shortage of medical resources and older people prefer home care over institutional care. Therefore, there is an urgent need for volunteers to help in RT. However, the age of volunteers tends to be increasingly younger. The lack of knowledge and experience of the past for the young volunteers makes it difficult for them to select appropriate stimulated materials. To improve this situation, a library of old photos for RT was developed to support conversation between the two generations. A two-factor experiment and emotion assessment scales were designed to explore the effect of different old photo types on the fluency of conversation between the two generations and their emotion. It was found that the types of old photos have little effect on older people and that conversations were almost pleasant. However, the pleasantness of older people was enhanced when using photos that they wanted to talk about (P = 0.006). Meanwhile, pleasure in conversation of the older people increased with the attention of the young people to the topic (R = 0.304, p < 0.001). Conversely, photo type has a strong impact on young people. When photos are selected that older people do not want to talk about or photos that young people do not know the content and are not interested in, concern for the topic of young people drops dramatically. Therefore, when RT, it is important to avoid using the types of photos above that cause a drop in younger people's attention.