“Who will I be?”: The future of the self as described by Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients
Résumé
We assessed how Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients would imagine their self in the future. AD patients and
healthy controls were asked to generate statements beginning with “I-will-be” to describe how they saw
themselves or how they wished to be in the future. These statements were analyzed in terms of four self-
dimensions, i.e., physical self, social self, psychological self and self-cessation. The latter was investigated to
assess how AD patients processed the idea of their own mortality. Findings demonstrated fewer total “I-will-
be” statements in AD participants than in controls, suggesting that the construction of future self-concepts
becomes weaker in the disease. Our results also demonstrated fewer statements related to the physical-self,
the social-self and the psychological-self, and more statements related to self-cessation in AD participants
than in controls. These findings suggest that AD patients are highly preoccupied by the idea of death when
thinking about the future of their self.
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