Personality and Affect Characteristics Associated With Compensation in Older Adults

Compensation (e.g., alarm setting) has the potential to improve or maintain everyday functioning and delay conversion to dementia. Various psychological characteristics may impact compensation and therefore could inform intervention development and response to intervention. This study aimed to evaluate whether personality and affective characteristics are associated with compensation after accounting for cognition in older adults without dementia. Measures of compensation (both self-report and informant-report), cognition, personality (neuroticism, openness, extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness), grit, self-efficacy, positive affect, and two types of negative affect (sadness, anger) were administered to a sample of 126 older adults (mean age = 76.6; mean education = 15.5 years; 61% female; 45% non-White). In analyses using the entire sample, higher ratings of anger were associated with self-reported compensation. In follow-up analyses stratified by ethnoracial group, neuroticism was a predictor of self-reported compensation in non-Hispanic White participants and openness was a predictor of informant-reported compensation in non-White participants. Our findings suggest that anger may facilitate activation to compensate for real or perceived cognitive change. Additionally, personality characteristics associated with compensation may vary across diverse ethnoracial groups and reporting source.