High-frequency assessment of mood, personality, and cognition in healthy younger, healthy older and adults with cognitive impairment

ABSTRACT

Increased variability in cognitive scores, mood or personality traits can be indicative of underlying neurological disorders. Whether variability in cognition is due to changes in mood or personality is unknown. A total of 66 younger adults, 51 healthy older adults and 38 participants with cognitive impairment completed 21 daily sessions of attention, working memory, mood, and personality assessment. Group differences in mean performance and variability were examined using Bayesian mixed effects location scale models. Variability in attention decreased from younger to older adults and then increased again in cognitive impairment. Younger adults were more variable in agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness compared to older adults. The clinically impaired group differed from the healthy older adults in terms of variability on attention, openness, and conscientiousness. Healthy aging results in greater stability in personality traits over short intervals yet this stability is not redundant with increased stability in cognitive scores.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• variability
• personality
• attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2023.2284412.

Notes

1. Note that we were unable to assess the influence of mood and fatigue on daily variability as those models would not successfully mix.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by a career development grant (K01 AG071847) from the National Institute on Aging awarded to Andrew Aschenbrenner.