Quality of Survey Responses at Older Ages Predicts Cognitive Decline and Mortality Risk.

Background and Objectives: It is widely recognized that survey satisficing, inattentive, or careless responding in questionnaires reduce the quality of self-report data. In this study, we propose that such low-quality responding (LQR) can carry substantive meaning at older ages. Completing questionnaires is a cognitively demanding task and LQR among older adults may reflect early signals of cognitive deficits and pathological aging. We hypothesized that older people displaying greater LQR would show faster cognitive decline and greater mortality risk. Research Design and Methods: We analyzed data from 9, 288 adults 65 years or older in the Health and Retirement Study. Indicators of LQR were derived from participants' response patterns in 102 psychosocial questionnaire items administered in 2006-2008. Latent growth models examined whether LQR predicted initial status and change in cognitive functioning, assessed with the modified Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status, over the subsequent 10 years. Discrete-time survival models examined whether LQR was associated with mortality risk over the 10 years. We also examined evidence for indirect (mediated) effects in which LQR predicts mortality via cognitive trajectories. Results: After adjusting for age, gender, race, marital status, education, health conditions, smoking status, physical activity, and depressive symptoms, greater LQR was cross-sectionally associated with poorer cognitive functioning, and prospectively associated with faster cognitive decline over the follow-up period. Furthermore, greater LQR was associated with increased mortality risk during follow-up, and this effect was partially accounted for by the associations between LQR and cognitive functioning. Discussion and Implications: Self-report questionnaires are not formally designed as cognitive tasks, but this study shows that LQR indicators derived from self-report measures provide objective, performance-based information about individuals' cognitive functioning and survival. Self-report surveys are ubiquitous in social science, and indicators of LQR may be of broad relevance as predictors of cognitive and health trajectories in older people.

Is Healthy Neuroticism Associated with Health Behaviors? A Coordinated Integrative Data Analysis.

Current literature suggests that neuroticism is positively associated with maladaptive life choices, likelihood of disease, and mortality. However, recent research has identified circumstances under which neuroticism is associated with positive outcomes. The current project examined whether "healthy neuroticism", defined as the interaction of neuroticism and conscientiousness, was associated with the following health behaviors: smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity. Using a pre-registered multi-study coordinated integrative data analysis (IDA) approach, we investigated whether "healthy neuroticism" predicted the odds of engaging in each of the aforementioned activities. Each study estimated identical models, using the same covariates and data transformations, enabling optimal comparability of results. These results were then meta-analyzed in order to estimate an average (N-weighted) effect and to ascertain the extent of heterogeneity in the effects. Overall, these results suggest that neuroticism alone was not related to health behaviors, while individuals higher in conscientiousness were less likely to be smokers or drinkers, and more likely to engage in physical activity. In terms of the healthy neuroticism interaction of neuroticism and conscientiousness, significant interactions for smoking and physical activity suggest that the association between neuroticism and health behaviors was smaller among those high in conscientiousness. These findings lend credence to the idea that healthy neuroticism may be linked to certain health behaviors and that these effects are generalizable across several heterogeneous samples.

Personality Predicts Mortality Risk: An Integrative Data Analysis of 15 International Longitudinal Studies.

This study examined the Big Five personality traits as predictors of mortality risk, and smoking as a mediator of that association. Replication was built into the fabric of our design: we used a Coordinated Analysis with 15 international datasets, representing 44,094 participants. We found that high neuroticism and low conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness were consistent predictors of mortality across studies. Smoking had a small mediating effect for neuroticism. Country and baseline age explained variation in effects: studies with older baseline age showed a pattern of protective effects (HR<1.00) for openness, and U.S. studies showed a pattern of protective effects for extraversion. This study demonstrated coordinated analysis as a powerful approach to enhance replicability and reproducibility, especially for aging-related longitudinal research.