Emotionally Unstable People at Higher Risk of Cognitive Disorders: Study

Have you ever thought that personality traits can actually affect your cognitive abilities? Research by the American Psychological Association suggests that people who are organised and have a high level of self-discipline are less likely to develop mental illnesses at an older age. Whereas the study highlights that people who are emotionally unstable have a greater chance of age with cognitive impairment.

A group of researchers tried to study the role of three personality traits, conscientiousness, neuroticism and extraversion in cognitive functioning including mild cognitive impairment (MCI), dementia, and mortality risk at an older age. As per the lead author Tomiko Yoneda, University of Victoria, “Personality traits reflect relatively enduring patterns of thinking and behaving, which may cumulatively affect engagement in healthy and unhealthy behaviours and thought patterns across the lifespan.”

The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology selected the participants from the Rush Memory and Aging Project. A total of 1954 participants without a formal diagnosis of dementia were taken from various communities such as retirement groups, church groups, and other senior housing facilities. The candidates were selected at the beginning of 1997 and were continuously assessed till this year. Every participant took a yearly cognitive assessment.

According to the study, the participants who scored high in conscientiousness were more organised, responsible and goal-oriented whereas people with greater neuroticism scores were said to have emotional stability issues and other mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, negative feelings and self-esteem issues.

Further, Yoneda asserted that on a scale of 0 to 48, if a person scores six more points on the conscientiousness scale, they face a low risk of dealing with cognitive impairment whereas if someone scores seven more points on the neuroticism scale, then there is a 12 percent chance of them developing cognitive impairment later in the life.

However, researchers were not able to connect the appropriate dots between extraversion and cognitive health. They did find out that people having high extraversion and conscientiousness with low neuroticism were on the safer side. The study also linked the connection between personality traits with mortality risk. The results reflected that participants who had high conscientiousness scores lived two years longer without cognitive impairment than participants with low conscientiousness scores.

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