Grumpiness, old age and good thinking link
A US study has suggested that grumpiness, old age and good thinking ability seem to go together. Associate Professor Jacqueline Bichsel from Morgan State University in Baltimore spoke on ABC Radio’s Health Program about the research which looked at 400 adults of all ages divided into three groups: people under 60 (youngsters); people over 60 whose intelligence was comparable to the young people and people over 60 with superior intelligence. The study has been reported in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Jacqueline Bichsel said that in the younger individuals both openness and extraversion go hand in hand with general knowledge.
The older group which was cognitively comparable to the younger group also showed that openness and extraversion predicted some cognitive abilities but that there were different abilities in this older group. Agreeableness was a negative predictor of general knowledge – or general cognitive ability. Those who tended to be more disagreeable in this group tended to score higher.
They were individuals who didn’t accept things at face value, liked to engage and debate opening them more to new opinions. The agreeableness measure is something that tends to measure your tendency to go along with the crowd and in this cognitively superior older group the tendency not to go along tends to go hand in hand with higher general cognitive ability.
Dr Bichsel said that it was not necessarily a bad thing to be disagreeable in old age and it might do some good to even encourage that behaviour in older individuals.
