Personality, chronic medical morbidity, and health-related quality of life among older persons.

Abstract

This article examines the main and moderating effects of 3 personality characteristics on the association between chronic medical morbidity and health-related quality of life (HRQL) in a large (N = 5,279) community-based older sample. Reasonably high unique contributions of neuroticism, mastery, and self-efficacy to HRQL were found. The additional amounts of variance explained beyond and above medical morbidity and age vary from about 4% (bodily pain) to above 30% (mental health). Little empirical evidence was found for the moderating effects of personality. In conclusion, personality characteristics such as neuroticism, mastery, and self-efficacy influence the reported levels of HRQL. The extent to which this is due to an influence of personality on true versus perceived levels of HRQL is unclear.

Psychosocial factors and health as determinants of quality of life in community-dwelling older adults

“…This study supports the findings of previous studies that personality and mood factors predict QoL over and above other, more objective factors [29,33,35,61]. Depressive mood state plays a particularly important role in these groups, as does the personality trait Emotional Stability, both of which corroborate previous research [6,32].…”

“…Neuroticism has also been found to affect the subjective components of health-related QoL in older adults [33]. Results concerning the remaining three personality factors are less consistent; some suggest a link between high Conscientiousness and better quality of life [23,31,34], and others suggest a limited and inconsistent role for Openness [32,35] and Agreeableness [23].…”

The Relative Contribution of Domains of Quality of Life to Overall Quality of Life for Different Chronic Diseases

“…With respect to subject non-response bias, non-response was not random but associated with the female gender and with higher age. Objectives, design and matters of representativeness of the GLAS study have been described earlier [21,23]. The results showed no evidence of non-response bias relevant to the issues addressed in our study.…”

“…GLAS was a population-based prospective followup study of the psychological and social determinants of disease, functional disability, wellbeing and utilisation of care in older people [21,[23][24][25][26][27]. The primary objective of this study was to identify the psychosocial factors that influence the trajectory of QoL, independently or in interplay with diseaserelated factors.…”

The Assessment of Disability Related to Vision Performance-Based Measure in Diabetic Retinopathy

“…Health-related QoL surveys, including vision-specific questionnaires, are influenced by a very broad range of factors including patient personality, individual preferences, personal biases, mental health, desire to mislead and desire to please. [1][2][3][4][5][6] In an effort to 4/22 develop new methods of assessing the visual health of patients, several investigators have developed and tested standardized protocols that evaluate the ability of individuals to perform visually-intensive daily activities. Although the content of these different investigative techniques tend to vary in the specific activities tested, they all have a common focus on detecting changes in very basic and practical visual abilities required to perform daily activities.…”