What makes us busy? Predictors of perceived busyness across the adult lifespan

Abstract

Busier people tend to perform better on cognitive tasks than less busy individuals. Nevertheless, the characteristics that are associated with greater perceived busyness are unknown. To address this question participants (N = 463) from the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study (ages 20–89) completed a self-report busyness assessment and demographic, health, personality, and lifestyle measures. Results revealed that perceived busyness peaked in 30-year-olds, showed age-related decreases until age 60, and then remained stable. Moreover, women generally reported being busier than men. Analysis of age by gender interactions revealed that men exhibited a significant cubic age effect for busyness, whereas women did not. Overall, younger age, female gender, agreeableness, neuroticism, frequent participation in novel activities, and enjoyment of cognitive processing were independently associated with being busier, and the characteristics related to busyness were generally stable across age. Notably, participation in novel activities and need for cognition were the most predictive lifestyle characteristics, supporting the framing of busyness as an indicator of mental engagement. We also propose personality-based sources of self-generated and other-generated busyness.

Keywords:

• Engagement
• gender
• lifespan
• personality

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 The Martin and Park Environmental Demands Questionnaire also includes a routines subscale that assesses the predictability of events in one’s daily life. We focus solely on the busyness subscale in the present study.

2 Note that the use of self-reported height and weight is vulnerable to bias (Rowland, 1990), but is still generally accurate (Stunkard & Albaum, 1981).

3 Note that pulse pressure was the only blood pressure measure entered to avoid collinearity.

4 For the sake of parsimony, we opted for this method rather than entering all 17 possible predictors into one model, which would limit our degrees of freedom.

5 To further interpret the cubic model, we performed a one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) on busyness as a function of age decade, F(6, 456) = 13.45, p < .001, along with follow-up Tukey HSD tests. Notably, people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s were not significantly different from each other (all ps ≥ .079), but were significantly busier than those in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, all ps< .02; 30-year-olds were also busier than people in their 50s, p < .001. The latter three decades did not differ from each other, ps> .9.

6 We included need for cognition in these analyses as a proxy of typical intellectual engagement, as they have been argued to be interchangeable (see Woo et al., 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute of Health Grant 5R37AG-006265-29 to D.C.P; and the Aging Mind Foundation support of S.B.F.