A study of the ‘big five’ personality traits has found that positive, extroverted, and conscientious people are less likely to get a dementia diagnosis than those with neurotic or negative personality traits.
Scientists from Northwestern University and the University of California, Davis said that the difference wasn’t due to pathological changes, but rather how traits allow some people to better navigate dementia-related impairments.
Although there have been studies trying to link personality to dementia, these have been small and only in specific populations.
Leveraging as much of this existing literature as possible, the team analyzed data from eight published studies involving more than 44,000 people, of whom 1,703 developed dementia.
They looked at the ‘big five’ personality traits of conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, neuroticism, and agreeableness along with subjective well-being, positive and negative affect, and life satisfaction.
They then compared these traits to clinical symptoms of dementia such as performance on cognitive tests and brain pathology at autopsy.
“We wanted to leverage new technology to synthesize these studies and test the strength and consistency of these associations,” said first author on the study Emorie Beck, assistant professor of psychology at UC Davis.
“If those links hold up, then targeting personality traits for change in interventions earlier in life could be a way to reduce dementia risk in the long term.”
This is important science, as the sciences in general, from medicine to history, are in a well-documented “reproducibility crisis” where between 50 to 90% of all scientific studies are non-reproduceable, and therefore of low or questionable value.
Using different methods to analyze existing literature is a good way to test its veracity.
Writing in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, Professor Beck said that people who score high on conscientiousness may be more likely to eat well and take care of their health, which results in better health in the long term.
She and her team found that high scores on negative traits and low scores on positive traits were associated with a higher risk of a dementia diagnosis. High scores on openness to experience, agreeableness, and life satisfaction had a protective effect in a smaller subset of studies.
However, no link was found between these personality traits and actual neuropathology in the brains of people after death.
“This was the most surprising finding to us,” said Beck. “If personality is predictive of performance on cognitive tests but not pathology, what might be happening?”
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“A possible explanation is that some personality traits could make people more resilient to the damage caused by diseases such as Alzheimer’s.”
People with high levels of some traits may find ways, even subconsciously, to cope with and work around impairments; for example, conscientiousness is associated with a strong work ethic, orderliness, and sense of responsibility that could in theory allow some people to work through the early stages of dementia.
The team also showed that some people with quite extensive physical symptoms in the brain can show little impairment on cognitive tests. So they looked at other factors between personality and dementia risk and neuropathology, including age, gender, and educational attainment.
“We found almost no evidence for effects, except that conscientiousness’s protective effect increased with age,” said Beck.
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It is hoped the study might provide the first steps into finding out what causes the condition to manifest itself and what could prevent this from happening.
Could you be resistant to dementia through your personality? There are a number of big 5 personality trait tests on the internet for free that can give you a sense.
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Conscientious? Pretty much. Positive? When I can. Extroverted? No. And it saddens me that being introverted is therefore considered “neurotic or negative”.