Title : Can specific personality traits serve as protective factors against age-related cognitive decline? A longitudinal study of experiential openness and executive functions in healthy older adults
Abstract:
Background: General studies of neurocognitive processing across the lifespan have demonstrated gradual declines among healthy adults in the domains of memory, problem-solving, executive functioning, and processing speed. However, a number of specific factors have been identified which account for significant differences between individuals in their capacity to compensate for and/or otherwise decrease the magnitude of this neurocognitive decline. Understanding and recognizing these individual differences in critical areas of cognitive processing is likely to be essential to improving the functional abilities and quality of life for older persons.
Experiential openness (EO), first proposed by McCrae and Costa (1978, 1987) in their five-factor model of personality, has been found to be positively related to enhanced autobiographical memory recall and reminiscing activity (Sperbeck and Whitbourne, 1982, 1985). Additionally, Ihle, Zuber, Gouveia et. al. (2019) found that EO adults engaged in more leisure time activities which served to mediate smaller cognitive declines in executive functioning relative to their Experientially Closed (EC) counterparts.
Participants: The current study was designed to test volunteer participants’ executive functioning, short-term memory, and incidental memory every five years for 25 years. The average age at the onset of the study was 55.57 years for the initial 175 participants who all completed the Experience Inventory. Over 25 years, participant attrition resulted in a total of 70 (32 Experientially Open and 38 Experientially Closed) participants completing all six testing sessions scheduled five years apart (circa 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020). Study participants were well-educated (mean years of education=14.75 years) and screened for physical health. Participants with medical evidence of (prodromal) neurological disease were excluded from the study.
Method: Participants agreed to complete a brief (1 hour) battery of neurocognitive tests once every five years for 25 years. The test battery consisted of the Halstead Category Test, Stroop Test, Wechsler Digit Span Test, and the Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Recall Test.
Results: Experientially Open participants displayed statistically significant (serial Mann-Whitney U Tests) preservation of neurocognitive test performance in all areas of executive and memory functioning between ages 55-75 years relative to their Experientially Closed counterparts. Even after age 75, declines were observable with EO participants but significantly less severe and precipitous than with EC participants. The most significant skill set preserved was noted in incidental memory (BVMGT) and the Interference Trial of the Stroop Test.
Discussion: Experiential Openness may serve a protective role in the preservation of neurocognition in the healthy aging population. The tests administered in this study likely reflected neuroanatomical correlates in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampal regions of the brain. As such, increased physical and ideational activities of a novel nature characteristic of Experiential Open adults may contribute to and enhance the neurogenesis process and lead to protection and preservation of neurocognitive capacities, and ultimately the postponement of debilitating cognitive decline.
