Show Notes

Read Dr. Beck’s study, “Personality predictors of dementia diagnosis and neuropathological burden: An individual participant data meta-analysis,” through the Alzheimer’s Association Journals website.

Learn more about Dr. Beck on her profile on the UC–Davis website.

Learn more about social isolation by listening to our episode, “The Impact of Social Isolation on Dementia Risk in Older Adults,” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and on our website.

Find out your personality type by taking the FiveThirtyEight Personality Quiz

Test your cognitive ability and participate in studies similar to Dr. Beck’s on TestMyBrain.org.

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Transcript

Intro: I’m Dr. Nathaniel Chin, and you’re listening to Dementia Matters, a podcast about Alzheimer’s disease. Dementia Matters is a production of the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. Our goal is to educate listeners on the latest news in Alzheimer’s disease research and caregiver strategies. Thanks for joining us. 

Dr. Nathaniel Chin: Welcome back to Dementia Matters. Today I’m joined by Dr. Emorie Beck, assistant professor at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), specializing in personality psychology. In 2023, Dr. Beck, alongside colleagues from Northwestern University and UC Davis, published research investigating the relationship between the Big Five personality traits — extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism — and risk of dementia. Analyzing data from eight longitudinal studies, the researchers found that, although there was no association between personality traits and dementia-related neuropathology, there was a relationship with certain personality traits and a person’s risk for dementia. Specifically, conscientiousness, extroversion, and positive affect were associated with a lower risk for dementia, while neuroticism and negative affect were associated with an increased risk. Dr. Beck is here today to talk about the findings of her research and what that might mean for the future of dementia interventions. Dr. Beck, welcome to Dementia Matters.

Dr. Emorie Beck: Thank you so much for having me.

Chin: We’re very excited to be able to talk about this fascinating topic today. I’m going to try to be as positive, outgoing, and conscientious as I can, because it sounds like these are going to be helpful for my brain, or at least for the future of my brain. But we’ll have you actually comment on that. To begin our conversation, can you share with our listeners what exactly is personality psychology and what drew you into this field and its overlap with dementia?

Beck: So when we think about what personality psychology is, our sort of lay definitions of what we think personality is are pretty much right. It’s both a study of who we are inherently in our core, as well as really this broader question about just how we all differ from one another. So how do we understand and quantify how I’m different from you, and you’re different from a partner or spouse and so on and so forth. What really I think drew me into the study of personality was just being really fascinated with this question of how people differ and being really unsatisfied with just the fact that it seemed like the only descriptors we had of people were that you could be kind or not or outgoing or not when that felt just like overly simplistic. As I sort of got into the study of personality, I think I really found myself pulled towards this question of, well, if there are all of these ways in which we differ from each other on these psychological, cognitive, behavioral aspects, then certainly this has to have pretty big ranging consequences for our lives. One of the ways that obviously I think a lot of us might start thinking about this is in terms of our health. That’s sort of how I ended up working in this space, where I’m looking at how it is that our personalities predict in the long run, so this could be as much as decades out, different kinds of health risks. Specifically, I find things like neuropathology and cognitive aging particularly interesting, because it’s this chance of both looking at this really important health outcome, but also something that in turn really impacts our personality. The way that we process information is so important for how we think about ourselves, how we process information in everyday life and more. There really is this fun chance to study this really consequential outcome in ways that have this bidirectional influence that’s unfolding across our whole lives.

Chin: What I find so interesting about your answers, when you start by saying who we are as people, I mean, that sounds like a very philosophical question, but you’re approaching this in a very scientific way, which we’ll learn more about in this interview. What a fascinating way to view the world and to conduct science. Before we get into your actual study, can you review the Big Five personality traits? I may have listed them in the introduction, but I’m hoping you can really define for us what these really mean, how we might notice them, and then also the subjective well-being, which is something else you studied in this paper.

Beck: Yeah, so I think in terms of understanding the Big Five, it’s kind of helpful to take a step back to that definition. As personality psychologists, when we’re talking about personality, we’re often talking about personality traits. When we’re talking about traits, we’re thinking about these as these characteristic patterns or tendencies of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. So the things that you tend to do, the things that you tend to think, and the things that you tend to feel. How these are just going to be ways of capturing who it is that you are, like inherently at your core. When we’re thinking about the Big Five, then I think it’s again kind of helpful to think about where these came from. The Big Five came from an idea called the lexical hypothesis. Personality psychology is not unique in relying on this. But the basic idea of the lexical hypothesis is just that, if there are these critical ways that people think, feel, and act, then these should be encoded in the language that we use to understand, describe, predict, etc. of ourselves and others. What one of the founding fathers of the field of personality psychology, Gordon Allport, did was just go to the dictionary and try to pull out all of these different adjectives that are supposed to be these descriptors in our language, and then just tried to make sense of them. To do that, what he and then others later did was use this tool for what’s called reducing data. So basically, it’s supposed to take something that has tons and tons of dimension, tens of thousands or more, and then tries to say, well, some of these are probably just exchangeable. Like I could say that you’re kind, but I could say that you’re nice and we might not necessarily mean something that different. Or I can say that you have high certainty or that you’re very outgoing. Again, we might be meaning the same thing. So do we need all these different labels or can we reduce these down to these core sets of differences across people? Then, over the next 20, 30 years, we see a bunch of people trying to answer this question of just how many dimensions do we need to, as best we can, accurately differentiate people from each other and understand these core personality traits that will allow us to understand both one person as well as a bunch of people relative to each other. Around the 1970s and 1980s, we see this convergence towards the Big Five. So we see that using different kinds of methods, using all different samples, that the Big Five keeps emerging as the best summary that we can based on this lexical tradition of what personality traits are, at least for most people. These Big Five traits are extroversion, and this is going to be your outgoingness. We think of extroversion a lot. It is one that has very much entered the lay parlance. But I think that it’s also important to mention that as we understand it, as personality psychologists, extroversion is not just being outgoing. It’s also being assertive. It’s being very active and it’s experiencing high levels of positive emotions. And then we have conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is one, these are people who are going to be organized, punctual; they’re going to engage in a lot of routine positive health behaviors, and they’re going to dislike deviations from routine. These are good people to have, especially in jobs, they are going to do what you asked them to do, and they’re going to do it thoroughly. And then agreeableness. I think with agreeableness, it’s easiest to think of this as these are those people that are so warm and so caring or, on the flip side of that, they’re so rude and so cold. That would be like the negative side of agreeableness. Beyond that, I think it’s also how trusting are you of other people? Do you have a tendency to trust other people or are you sort of distrustful – especially when you first meet someone. Then we have neuroticism, which can really just be called emotional instability. This encompasses a lot of things and I think it’s very near and dear to many of us. This is everything from experiencing low grade depressive symptoms and feeling just sad a lot of the time. It’s feeling anxious. It’s being very reactive whenever a stressor does come up. So whenever something bad happens in your life, you are the person, if you’re high in neuroticism, who’s ready to go on a dime and have those increases in negative emotions. And they also then tend to persist over time. So it’s that reactivity, as well as just experiencing more negative emotions than other people. Then finally, we have openness. So openness is – I think of it as a bit of a grab bag of a trait, because relative to the sort of coherence that we’ve seen in these four other Big Five traits – openness includes everything from being creative to liking or disliking conventions. The people who are high in openness tend to dislike convention. It also encompasses your aesthetic sensitivity. Are you someone who’s really moved by music? It can also even just have these intellect or very cognitive components that are very relevant to thinking about our cognitive abilities in everyday life. The idea is that together these create this holistic summary of a person where you can get their relative rankings on these Big Five traits and understand who they are as a person, the things that they’re likely to do. As personality has matured into a science, we’ve also seen a bunch of stuff that’s trying to understand what kinds of risks your personality may carry with it and not just risks, but benefits or opportunities as well.

Chin: Then what about subjective well-being? Because that’s a term that’s used a lot in the lay non-scientific area. But I’m sure you’re using it for very specific reasons.

Beck: Yeah. When we say subjective well-being in this paper, we’re talking about a model by Ed Diener of subjective well-being. This could be called a hedonic model of well-being. It’s very much focusing on and maximizing these positive aspects and minimizing pain or these negative aspects. Ed and his colleagues broke this down into these three different dimensions. So we have your satisfaction with life. Do you just think that things in your life have gone pretty well? Are you sort of dissatisfied with where you are in your life? Positive affect, which just means, do you tend to report that you feel a lot of gratitude and joy and other positive aspects of your emotions? And then negative affect is the flip of that. Do you report that you tend to experience a lot of sadness, fear, anger, depression, and so on? Relative to these super, super broad personality traits that are encompassing lots of things, these are just a little bit narrower trying to capture these very distinct parts of especially our emotional sort of experiences and well-being.

Chin: One of the words you used a lot in your explanation was tendency or tend to, and I think that speaks to those of us not in your field. I feel like I have parts of everything you just said and certain days I feel like I am one or the other, but it seems like it’s okay to be across all of them, but you would tend to do more of one over the other. Is that alright? Am I right in understanding that?

Beck: Do you mean each of the Big Five relative to each other, or have different behaviors that are associated with each of those traits?

Chin: We might tend on some days to be more open versus not open or to be neurotic and not neurotic. Do you just draw a line and say with the majority of the time you’re this, then you tend to gravitate that way? Or I mean, what do you say to people who say, I have a lot of these different components or on different sides of each trait?

Beck: Well, I would say you are exactly right. That’s actually a big part of what my research program tries to answer is how does our personality expression vary over time? But at least in terms of measuring these, what we’re meaning are two different things. These can be measured in either of these ways and tend to provide very convergent evidence. One is very much capturing your self-concept. So do you think of yourself as someone who is outgoing? And then when you answer that, if you think that that is true of you, then you’re likely to say that you’re higher than someone else. Then the second is actually just to see what you actually do. So do people who say that they’re high in extroversion actually talk to more people? Do they actually approach more strangers? Do they persist in conversations longer than people who are lower in extroversion? Those tend to be pretty convergent. There are, especially some issues with things like social desirability, if we all want to think of ourselves as people who are warm and outgoing and aren’t very emotionally unstable and so on. But even whenever trying to do some of these corrections and things like that, we do see that we’re pretty good actually at talking about what it is that we do.

Chin: Well, so then how might personality traits impact cognitive aging and the development of dementia?

Beck: Yeah, so when we think about how it is that our personality traits might impact our long term health, there’s two different routes, and both of these are rather indirect. On the one hand, we know that people who, for example, are higher in conscientiousness are much more likely to engage in just a whole host of positive health behaviors. They are going to eat better. They’re going to exercise more. They’re going to drink less, smoke less. They’re going to engage in preventative medicine and actually go to their doctor for that preventative care. On the flip of that, we know that all of those things are associated with not just better cognitive aging, but better just aging across the board and better health. On the other side, we see that neuroticism is associated with the opposite of conscientiousness. It’s associated with smoking more, drinking more, exercising less, and so on. The idea is that these tendencies that we have, these personality traits, are going to dictate the kinds of behaviors that we engage in, which then all over these longer periods of time accrue into long-term risk of different kinds of health outcomes. The second pathway that we often think about is through these inflammatory pathways. We know in particular that things like negative emotions are really, really high risk factors for just having higher levels of inflammation that then accrue to these long-term health risks. For example, everyone knows about and talks about cortisol. I think some claims about it are very overblown, but we do know that there are these sort of different axes in the body that are going to be responsive to our emotional experiences that can again and accrue into these long-term health risks.

Chin: What is the gap in the knowledge that your investigation was trying to address, knowing that you are investigating these longer term consequences and that you’re an expert in these personality traits?

Beck: Yeah, so especially in this kind of space where we’re thinking about personality traits, subjective well-being, and then dementia, we have seen a number of studies that have been popping up, especially over the last 20 or so years, that have been trying to link personality traits and subjective well-being, to a lesser extent, to especially dementia diagnoses, as well as a couple of different markers of this neuropathological burden, or just these neurobiological measures that are supposed to map onto the underlying pathology that we think underlies Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia. What we know from that is not that much. We see actually a relatively consistent effect perhaps for conscientiousness and neuroticism with conscientiousness predicting less likely diagnoses of dementia and neuroticism predicting more likely diagnoses. But all of these studies tended to be single studies. They tended to be relatively small, and they tended to encompass relatively narrow spans of time. It could be that we measure your personality and we’re just looking a year later or something like that. This creates a problem because we’re not able to then disentangle what your personality was like before the onset of dementia, which might be associated and accompanied by personality changes, from these actual changes that may have occurred. We could just be capturing differences in the personalities of people who actually have dementia from people who don’t. What we wanted to do was just say, how much data can we actually get our hands on that has these measures of Big Five personality traits and then, sometimes decades later, has these measures of their cognitive health, be that from these dementia diagnoses or if they had passed and had gotten these different autopsies, could we actually get these markers of neuropathology that might help us to understand both these general kinds of mechanisms we think are linked to all sorts of different dementias as well as some of these different types of neuropathologies that are linked to specific kinds of dementias? We just gathered about 45,000 people from about nine different studies and just tried to basically do what’s called an individual participant meta-analysis of these. This differs a little bit from traditional meta-analysis in that we had the raw data, which means that we didn’t have to rely on choices of other researchers. We didn’t have to just look at summary statistics and hope for the best, but we actually were able to do all of the analyses with the raw data and also ask the exact questions that we wanted to ask and not be limited by what people had done before us.

Chin: That’s an incredible number of people that you were able to look at their raw data. I want to get into your publication then. This was a publication in Alzheimer’s and Dementia, and it’s titled, “Personality Predictors of Dementia Diagnosis and Neuropathology in Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis.” How exactly did you study the personality traits, the risk for dementia, and dementia-related pathology?

Beck: Yeah, so a big part of my research program is actually just tracking down data. I spend a lot of time just poring through code books of different studies that are ongoing throughout the world and trying to see what kinds of measures they have and whether I can sort of convert those into the kinds of measures that I need to answer questions about personality and health. In this instance, I looked at a relatively large set of studies that I had used in the past, as well as some that were just in the literature that have these measures of the Big Five. There are a bunch of different measures of the Big Five, but what personality psychology has done a really good job of is creating these maps between them. So that we know whenever one study uses something like the Big Five Inventory, and another uses something like the Big Five markers, that these are going to essentially be the exact same thing. We know that like with certainty, so it helps us to be able to then take all these different sources of data. Then similarly with subjective well-being, we don’t necessarily have to worry to the extent that we do with the Big Five about different measures, because really everyone uses what’s called the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and everyone uses the Satisfaction with Life Scale. With those, we didn’t have to worry too much about these measurement differences because people are pretty much using the same thing. We just tracked down studies that had these measures and then also had, at a minimum, some sort of dementia diagnosis marker. This could have been self-reported doctor diagnosis, or it could have been this very in-depth cognitive testing that things like our RUSH sites were doing. And one of the questions that we wanted to address with that is whether it’s valid to just hope that people can accurately self-report these. I can talk a little bit more about that later. We also wanted these measures of neuropathology. For neuropathology, the great thing is that there are these standardized checklists that are often used whenever this autopsy research is conducted so that you do get these quite standard measures that make it easy to harmonize across these different samples. We ended up, after all that, with nine different studies who met at least some of these inclusion criteria. These were from the U.S., the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and Sweden. So we had Western countries, but at least we had more than just people in the U.S. or just people in Germany.

Chin: Well, so now that we know how you investigated and conducted the study, what were the key takeaways from your analysis?

Beck: So I think there are, I guess, three broad takeaways. The first is just what traits were associated with dementia diagnoses and this was, I think, our biggest finding in some ways. We found that conscientiousness, extroversion, and positive affect were protective against dementia diagnoses and then neuroticism and negative affect were risk factors for it. I think it’s kind of helpful, for this finding, to contextualize it a little bit. One of the very intentional choices we made in this study was how we score these personality tests, and we scored them in terms of percent, because we think that percent is something that most of us can understand. This then allows us to say that a 10 percent difference in something like a conscientiousness score is associated with 15 percent lower odds of actually getting a dementia diagnosis later on, and that a 10 percent difference in something like neuroticism is associated with about an 11 percent increase in the odds of getting a dementia diagnosis later on. So these are relatively large effect sizes, but I think also help to put it in a way that is understandable for at least most people. Our second finding was that these personality traits did not predict neuropathology, at least not in our meta-analytic results. There was a very, very small number of single studies that did show associations with different neuropathological markers but, unfortunately, these were really inconsistent across samples to the point where it’s almost impossible to interpret them. Our third findings, we also looked at a number of different moderators. So we tried to say, well, is it just that people who are more educated are more conscientious and that’s why it is that they don’t end up getting these dementia diagnoses? And we actually found almost no moderators of any of these associations, which suggests that these cannot sort of be explained by these third variables.

Chin: Well, that seems like a very powerful finding, your third one, that this is a real signal and that these other factors are not impacting them.

Beck: Yeah. The only one we did find was age, which is relatively expected, especially once you’re working in this space, if anything, with cognitive aging. If age doesn’t predict, moderate, or something, then you probably have a problem.

Chin: What was your takeaway from the personality traits analysis in the neuropathology finding itself? 

Beck: So one of the things that we found was that these personality traits were highly predictive of your dementia diagnoses, but were unassociated with your neuropathology. That feels like it should be incorrect. If there is actually this specific kind of pathology that is underlying the clinical dysfunction that is getting diagnosed, then why would we see this gap? What we think actually is happening here is that these personality traits might be particularly helpful for helping people to sort of persist even if they do have underlying pathology. There has been some work done by Eileen Graham at Northwestern University and some others who are looking at this idea of cognitive resilience and have demonstrated that some personality traits are associated with that. What I mean when I say this is that what we think is happening is that if I’m high in conscientiousness and I have quite a bit of neuropathology in my brain, these routines and things like that that I have might just kind of help me to be able to persist in my life and not actually demonstrate the kind of impairment that would be necessary for a clinical diagnosis, even though it’s there. Similarly to extraversion, you might be able to rely on those social relationships to be able to mask some of those symptoms and still be able to navigate your life successfully. That’s sort of our best guess for some of these ways in which we might start seeing this weird asymmetry with where what we think as the underlying biological causes aren’t associated with these traits, but the actual presentation of them in everyday life is.

Chin: You did allude to this, and this is one of my prepared questions for you. As a clinician in a memory clinic, of course, the diagnosis of dementia has a great deal of meaning to me. There is a difference, at least in the clinical world, of “Well, I think I have this” versus “No, you went through a thorough process”. Did you notice a difference between self-report of a dementia diagnosis or an actual thorough evaluation proving a dementia diagnosis?

Beck: So we didn’t have strong expectations kind of going in, especially whenever we were thinking about these specific associations between personality traits and dementia diagnoses, on if there would be a difference between these clinical diagnoses and these self-reported ones, with maybe the exception that we thought that people who are higher in neuroticism might be slightly more likely to self-report a diagnosis that they had actually not gotten from a clinician. But ultimately, we actually found that there was no difference in terms of how dementia diagnoses were measured in the way that these associations fell out. They were incredibly consistent across these different samples, regardless of how it is that these dementia diagnoses were actually measured.

Chin: Another part of your paper that I thought was really interesting was this finding, which I think you say is a novel finding, that the negative affect had a relationship with the dementia diagnosis. Can you expand on that? What does that mean for the field as you’re studying this?

Beck: Yeah. So I think that kind of having the space where we’re talking both about personality traits and well-being is a great way to intro into thinking about the differences and similarities with them. Thinking about your personality predicting something in the long term is kind of scary because we think of our personalities as these very stable aspects of ourselves that we carry with us through our whole lives. Like we don’t expect that we’re getting a new personality across the course of our lives. We might expect that we mature, but we’re still the same person at our core. When we see that things like neuroticism, for example, is associated with poor health, it’s really easy to be like, well, I’m screwed, and that’s it because I can’t change my personality. Instead, when we think about negative affect, we think about that as something that we do experience more or less of both at different times of our lives as well as relative to other people, but we also feel like that’s something that we can change. That’s something as simple as doing a gratitude list or something like that every morning should reduce your negative affect over the course of time. That’s something I think that offers this entrance to thinking about personality, thinking about individual differences as these modifiable risk factors that can then improve our health in the long run.

Chin: Well, then on the flip side, you found in your study that conscientiousness had a more positive, or I would say, I guess, a potential impact on resilience when it comes to cognitive aging and dementia. Can you explain how that might be working?

Beck: Yeah. So with conscientiousness, we think of it as our most behavioral trait. We look at the things that we use to measure it. It’s ‘Are you punctual?’ It’s ‘Do you sort of persist in a task until it’s completed?’, ‘How thorough are you in doing tasks?’. So it’s all very much about these things that you do and how completely or thoroughly that you actually do them. What we think is linking conscientiousness to this then is, if I’m going to exercise, I’m not just going to quit when it gets hard. If I’m going to try to improve my diet, I’m not going to try it for a few days, hate it and then quit. These are going to be the people that are going to persist. But I think that, in that same vein, because conscientiousness is so behavioral I think it’s a really important trait to talk about more, because – although I introduced the difference between these Big Five traits and subjective well-being as subjective well-being feels like it’s much more changeable – we actually know that personality traits are quite changeable. There are both these life course changes where people tend to get more conscientiousness as they get older. People tend to decrease in neuroticism and they tend to increase in agreeableness. Even just by getting older, we expect these changes but, more than that, we actually have evidence that you can intentionally change your personality traits. So there was a meta-analysis that was published about six years ago that looked at the impact of just any kind of psychotherapy on personality traits and specifically on the Big Five. They found across the board that there were some slight changes for each of the Big Five but this was especially pronounced for neuroticism. Just six weeks of psychotherapy were associated with what’s called about half-standard deviations. You can think of something like about that 10 percent that we were talking about prior. Decreases in neuroticism from just six weeks of psychotherapy that persisted for a minimum of six months just because that was the typical follow-up range and so they couldn’t look beyond that, which just suggests that these are very changeable. The way that we think that this is changing, we think that personality traits change bottom-up. What that means is if I want to be more conscientious, then I can behave more conscientiously. Maybe that starts by trying to do a little bit in your diet. That could even be as simple as trying to add an extra serving of vegetables at every meal. And then maybe the next week you try walking for 10 minutes. And then maybe on that 10 minute walk, you make an appointment to see your preventative care specialist. If you continue to do these things repeatedly, in the same way that we think that negative health behaviors accumulate to long-term risk, these positive behaviors should accumulate both to reductions in long-term risk but also to long-term changes in your conscientiousness that should become stable over time.

Chin: I’m so glad you provided that answer because during this interview I’m thinking to myself, oh no, personality traits are not going to change, like, I guess, we have to move on. But it is nice to know that we can actually modify these. And that’s because for me, my next question for you is one that I like to ask a lot of our scientists and researchers, which is, what can our listeners do with this information? As they are thinking about, how can I live my best life? How can I prevent, ideally something like the development of dementia? Is there something that people can take away from your study that they can incorporate in their day-to-day lives that you think will be meaningful in the long run?

Beck: Absolutely. So I think, for me, looking at the actual findings that we had. So we saw that extroversion, conscientiousness, and positive affect were sort of these protective factors and then neuroticism and negative affect were these risk factors. If we think about the things that people who are high in those traits do, then those could kind of become the things we might want to try to improve in ourselves. People who are higher in extroversion do tend to experience more positive emotions. They just tend to engage more in social behaviors. We also know that things like social health are incredibly important for our long-term cognitive health, to the point that we just saw the surgeon general sort of declare loneliness and social isolation this epidemic. Trying to act more extroverted, trying to engage more socially is a great way to think about mitigating some of this long-term risk. Similarly, we’ve talked a lot about conscientiousness. So thinking about all of these different kinds of health behaviors, how being more routine, being more planful can actually be really helpful for structuring your life in ways that allows you to make these better decisions. Similarly with positive affect, negative affect, and neuroticism, both trying to foster more of these positive emotions through things, like gratitude, journaling, and even just taking a walk in nature and kind of being awed by this world that we live in, to try to reduce some of these negative emotions, get your anxiety under control, which then hopefully you should also do things like improve your sleep. Just these small, small behaviors really should accrue in the long run, both into changes in your personality that should hopefully have these wide-ranging effects across a number of different health outcomes, as well as specifically mitigating your risk of these different kinds of long term chronic conditions.

Chin: I love that answer. Thank you for being so positive about it too. It does seem like it’d be worthwhile for people to know where they fall on the Big Five traits so that they could potentially address the things that might lead to better overall aging. For the end of our conversation today, I’m wondering what’s next for you after this study? Where do you see the field in general going? And where do you see your work actually translating then to clinical care?

Beck: Yeah. So for me, at least in terms of thinking about a lot of my next steps throughout this whole conversation, I’ve done a lot of speculating. It’s a lot of how we think that the way that conscientiousness gets into our cognitive aging is via these health behaviors and so on. Right now, what my colleagueZoëHawks and I are trying to do is just get into these in everyday life. We’re actually collecting data from middle and older adults right this very second, where they get these text messages on their phones and then fill out surveys about their personality at that moment, whether I’m being more conscientious than usual, whether I’m being more erotic than usual, and so on. We also give them cognitive tests. So these super short, we call them brain games where you’re filling out these different kinds of cognitive tasks in everyday life. What we’re hoping to learn from this is, one, do we actually sort of see evidence that personality traits and personality, as we call them, state these momentary levels, are associated with sort of short and long-term cognitive risk via these different levels of health behaviors that people are engaging in. More than that, can we really kind of zoom in and be like, so for me, my conscientiousness actually seems to have very little bearing on how well I’m cognitively functioning at this moment but something like extraversion might be super impactful. I might be super cognitively dull whenever I’m actually not getting as much social engagement as would be typical for me. If we can figure out these links, figure out where perhaps some of this cognitive dysfunction is arising, then that could be a great way to find these really targeted things that we could actually change for people versus me saying, you are sort of high and low in these things. Here’s 74 things that you can change, which may not be a realistic ask. So we’re really trying to move into this space where maybe we can create these sort of tailored or personalized interventions that we think should, over longer periods of time again, allow you to mitigate that long-term risk.

Chin: Well, that seems like a very exciting study, and I love the use of the cell phone and texting and digital testing. So when you publish that one, we’ll definitely have you back on the podcast so you can share your results on that. But until then, thank you, Dr. Beck, for being on Dementia Matters. It’s been very exciting. I would say a podcast where I’ve done a lot of learning and self-reflection, so I appreciate your conversation.

Beck: No, thank you so much for having me and I hope that all the listeners have enjoyed learning more about their personalities.

Outro: Thank you for listening to Dementia Matters. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Or tell your smart speaker to play the Dementia Matters podcast. Please rate us on your favorite podcast app. It helps other people find our show and lets us know how we’re doing. If you enjoy our show and want to support our work, consider making a gift to the Dementia Matters Fund through the UW Initiative to End Alzheimer’s. All donations go toward outreach and production. Donate at the link in the description.Dementia Matters is brought to you by the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It receives funding from private, university, state and national sources, including a grant from the National Institutes on Aging for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. This episode of Dementia Matters was produced by Amy Lambright Murphy and Caoilfhinn Rauwerdink, and edited by Eli Gadbury. Our musical jingle is Cases to Rest by Blue Dot Sessions. To learn more about the Wisconsin Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, check out our website at adrc.wisc.edu. That’s adrc.wisc.edu and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, email us at dementiamatters@medicine.wisc.edu. Thanks for listening.