Friday, January 20, 2012

Brain Teasers Make Seniors More Open to New Ventures

By Shalmali Pal, Contributing Editor, MedPage Today
Published: January 19, 2012
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and
Dorothy Caputo, MA, RN, BC-ADM, CDE, Nurse Planner


A cognitive training program that included Sudoku and crossword puzzles made older adults more open to new experiences, according to a preliminary study.

After 16-weeks of training in inductive reasoning, participants demonstrated more willingness to try new activities than a control group (P<0.05), reported Joshua Jackson, PhD, from Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues in Psychology and Aging.

Older adults undergo changes in personality, including shifts in openness or willingness to seek out new and cognitively challenging experiences. A number of interventions have been designed to enrich cognitive functioning in older adults, but little has been done to develop openness, the authors explained.

Action Points
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 In addition to declines in cognitive abilities, including working memory and inductive reasoning, aging is associated with changes in personality such as the trait of openness to new and challenging experiences.
 This study shows that changes in openness to experience in older adults can change with interventions aimed to increase cognitive ability.

"We hypothesized that an intervention aimed at improving cognitive functioning would change the personality trait of openness," they wrote.

Participants were recruited from an ongoing community-based cognitive intervention program. The mean age of the seniors was 72.9 and the majority were white (94%). On average, participants had completed 15.5 years of education.

Seniors could not be involved in the study if they were engaged in more than 15 hours of work or volunteer activities per week. Other exclusion criteria included stroke in the past three years, active cancer treatment, or a scores of less than 24 on the Mini-Mental State Examination.

Participants were randomized into an intervention group or a waitlist control group. They were paid by the researchers for finishing all of the study assessments. The intervention group saw a 92% completion rate among 85 enrollees; the control group had an 89% completion rate among 98 enrollees.

The intervention consisted of a classroom-based inductive reasoning training program that focused on novel pattern recognition. Participants also did home-based Sudoku and crossword puzzles. Puzzle sets were matched to each person's skill level based on his performance during the previous week, and increased in difficulty when appropriate.

Participants underwent personality trait and inductive reasoning tests before, during, and after the study. Second-order latent growth models were used to analyze the effect of training on openness to experience.

At pretest, there were no differences between the two groups for openness to experience or a composite measure of inductive reasoning skill. The training led to increases in inductive reasoning in the study arm compared with controls (P<0.05).

The authors reported that post-test openness scores were higher for the training group than for the control group.

They also noted that changes in inductive reasoning did not mediate the effect on changes in openness, based on a Sobel test (z=1.47). This suggested that cognitive intervention influenced openness above and beyond increases in inductive reasoning.

The 'use it or lost it' tag is often attributed to these types of studies, they pointed out, and "the current results suggest that 'using it' also can lead people to view themselves as more open ... openness to experience is linked to better health and decreased mortality risk."

The study had some limitations. It did not examine the mechanisms by which changes in openness occurred. The authors also could not determine if the intervention effect was because of the inductive reasoning training, the puzzles, or both.

Finally, the participants were not actively involved in other activities so the results may not have general application.

However, the authors stressed that their study is one of the first to demonstrate that personality traits can be altered with nonpyschopharmocological interventions. Future research should look at the range of cognitive activities that could lead to personality changes.

The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute on Aging.
No conflicts of interest were disclosed.

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