Five-Factor Model Personality Traits and the Trajectory of Episodic Memory: Individual-Participant Meta-Analysis of 471,821 Memory Assessments from 120,640 Participants.

This article examines the association between the Five-Factor Model (FFM) personality traits—neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness—and changes in episodic memory over time. Analyzing data from nine large longitudinal cohort studies comprising 120,640 participants and 471,821 memory assessments over up to 26 years, the study found that higher neuroticism was consistently linked to poorer average memory performance and greater memory decline, while higher conscientiousness was associated with better average memory and less decline, but only in samples with more than two memory assessments. Openness, extraversion, and agreeableness were positively related to average memory performance but showed no consistent association with memory change. The findings suggest that multiple repeated memory assessments are necessary to reliably detect personality-related memory decline and that these associations largely reflect normative aging rather than dementia-related changes.