Four-year reciprocal relationships between personality and functional ability in older adults with and without sensory impairment: focus on neuroticism and agreeableness

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Personality traits have been found to influence health and functional ability (FA) via multiple pathways. However, personality traits may also change in reaction to constraints in FA, particularly in more vulnerable individuals with high risk of decline in independent functioning in daily life (e.g. older adults with sensory impairment). Therefore, conceptually anchored in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF model), this study investigated reciprocal relationships between personality, focusing on neuroticism and agreeableness, and indicators of FA (i.e. activities of daily living and subjective autonomy) as well as the potentially moderating role of sensory impairment status.

Method: The study sample consisted of 387 older adults (mean age at T1: M = 82.50 years, SD = 4.71 years) who were either sensory impaired (SI; i.e. visually or hearing impaired) or sensory unimpaired (UI). A total of 168 individuals were reassessed four years later.

Results: Depending on sensory status, personality acted both as predictor and as outcome of FA. Neuroticism was more strongly related with later FA outcomes in SI than in UI individuals. FA variables, in turn, were significant predictors of later neuroticism in UI older adults only and of later agreeableness in SI individuals only.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that the late-life personality-FA interplay needs to be considered bidirectional, and the direction of associations varies systematically as a function of sensory impairment status.

KEYWORDS:

• Hearing
• vision
• old age
• autonomy
• everyday competence

Acknowledgments

We want to extend our appreciation to PD Dr Ingo Baumann, Prof. Dr. Hans Hörmann, Prof. Dr Jost Jonas, Prof Dr Peter Plinkert, and Prof. Dr Klaus Rohrschneider, who provided outstanding support in generating the sensory impaired subsamples. Furthermore, we are very grateful for the support received from the company KIND Hörgeräte, which provided the audiometric assessment. Finally, we would like to thank our project staff and interviewers – particularly, Nadine Langer and Christina Hunger – and all our study participants who invested considerable time and energy to serve our research.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

1. There were, however, individuals who had developed a dual-sensory impairment after the first measurement occasion: among those who were reassessed at T2, 4 VI older individuals were found to be additionally affected by severe hearing loss (i.e. ≥35 dB HL across the speech frequencies in the better ear), and 5 initially HI individuals were found to be also severely impaired in vision after 4 years (i.e. corrected near and/or visual decimal acuity ≤ .30). Moreover, one participant who was sensory unimpaired at baseline revealed dual sensory impairment 4 years later.

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) [grant number WA 809/7-1].