Can Your Personality Help You Optimize Your Cognitive Health as You Age?

Have you ever witnessed the physical or cognitive decline of a loved one and worried that you were destined for the same fate?  Have you ever observed an older adult who is “sharp as a tack” and wished to have the same experience when you get older? How do you know which path you will be on, and is there anything you can do to point the needle in the direction of good cognitive health?

The loss of cognitive abilities is somewhat inevitable in old age, and to an extent should be expected, even in the absence of a clinical dementia diagnosis. There’s good news though: this doesn’t happen to everyone, and there may even be things you can do to prevent or lessen your personal experience of decline as you get older.

Who Maintains Their Cognitive Abilities And Who Doesn’t?

This was our big question. My collaborators and I looked at rates of cognitive decline both before and after a dementia diagnosis, and explored whether personality traits were related to this decline. Luckily we found four studies that have been tracking the same groups of people for several decades, collecting data about their cognitive abilities nearly every year.  Every time a person underwent cognitive testing, they were also examined by a team of experts that made a yearly determination of whether or not that person had developed dementia. This allowed us to look at how quickly a person declined in their cognitive abilities both before and after they were diagnosed. Additionally, each person answered questions about their personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness), in case a person’s personality played a role in decline.

The four studies were especially believable because they included very different types of people: priests and nuns from around the United States, older adults in the Chicago area, ethnically diverse older adults in the Bronx and New York City area, and twins in Sweden. The results were similar in each.

Yes, There Was Decline, BUT…..

People did decline on their cognitive abilities as they got older, but there are indeed individuals whose decline is slower. We also found that once there is a diagnosis of dementia, this decline quickens.

Personality traits mattered, in several ways. Two personality characteristic emerged as the most important. First, individuals higher in neuroticism—that is, people who reported greater overall anxiety, moodiness, and tendency towards worry—had worse overall cognitive ability. These individuals with higher neuroticism had poorer functioning over the course of their entire older adulthood, but neuroticism did not influence a person’s rate of cognitive decline. 

We also found that individuals who were high on the trait openness to experience—the tendency to have high levels of curiosity, imagination, and willingness to explore new perspectives—had better cognitive function over the course of their older adulthood. These individuals tended to experience less decline in their cognitive abilities, but for those who developed dementia, their rate of decline was steeper after they developed dementia. People who are high on this trait are typically better educated and also tend to consistently engage in activities that challenge their minds, which may in turn help them maintain good cognitive health as they get old.  This fits with scientists’ ideas about optimal cognitive aging: a goal of healthy aging is to maintain abilities for as long as possible, and then to decline quickly once disease sets in. Another term for this is “compression of morbidity.” Researchers are working to understand how to compress the amount of time older adult spend in an unhealthy state (morbidity) into as short a window as possible, so that the majority of their older years are spent as healthy, high functioning individuals.

In sum, while cognitive abilities are likely to go down steadily as you get older, having certain personality traits may be a useful tool towards protecting those abilities, and optimizing your chances of experiencing healthy cognitive functioning throughout your older years.

For Further Reading

Graham, E. K., James, B. D., Jackson, K. L., Willroth, E. C., Luo, J., Beam, C. R., ... & Mroczek, D. K. (2021). A coordinated analysis of the associations among personality traits, cognitive decline, and dementia in older adulthood. Journal of Research in Personality, 92, 104100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104100
 

Eileen K. Graham is a Research Assistant Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Her interests are in personality trait development, optimizing cognitive aging, and in methodologies to improve credibility in psychological aging research.

Daniel K. Mroczek is a Professor of Psychology and Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University’s Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences and Feinberg School of Medicine. His interests are in lifespan personality development, individual differences in healthy aging and mortality, and in quantitative methods.