The Moderation Role of Neuroticism for Anxiety among Burdened Dementia Caregivers: A Study on Care Giver-Recipient Dyads

ABSTRACT

Caregiving burden proves to be a risk factor of anxiety disorders and anxiety affection. The current study investigates how an endogenous personality dimension – neuroticism – moderates the association between caregiving burden and anxiety affection. Between 2015 and 2017, the study deployed a cross-sectional survey of 674 (response rate = 89%) older adults who were hospitalized for dementia at two hospitals. From all primary caregivers of these patients, 661 agreed to participate in the survey which yielded 661 matched dyads as the final sample. Caregiving burden, neuroticism, and anxiety affection were each measured by established assessment instruments. We employed multivariate OLS regression to test the moderator and regressor effects. We found that care burden is a significant risk factor of higher levels of anxiety affection (β = .17, p < .001), and accounts for 4.6% of the variance in anxiety. Neurotic personality is also significantly associated with a greater level of anxiety (β = .26, p < .001). Neurotic personality moderates the association between anxiety and care burden (β = .24, p < .001). Our findings suggest that social and healthcare workers should assess caregiver personality and burden as well as provide support, resources, and coping strategies to those with neurotic personality traits or high care burden in an effort to reduce anxiety among caregivers.

KEYWORDS:

• Caregiving
• dementia
• elder abuse
• neuroticism
• care burden

Acknowledgments

No acknowledgement is presented to other parties than the current coauthors.

Disclosure statement

We have not received a financial contribution from a company or organization that might benefit (or lose) financially from the results, conclusions or discussion presented in the paper.

Institutional review

This study was approved by the ethics committee of Hong Kong University (ref EA1707030).

Notes

¹ Assuming normal distribution, the percentile of 21 on N(18.3, 4.4) is 73.2.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this study came from The Social Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science #GD21YSH05).