Conscientiousness is an important trait for understanding healthy aging. The present article addresses how behavioral and molecular genetics methodologies can aid in furthering explicating the link between conscientiousness and aspects of health and well-being in later life. We review the etiology of conscientiousness documented by both quantitative and molecular genetics methods. We also discu...

OBJECTIVES This study examined whether perceived social support predicted adaptive personality change in older adulthood, focusing on the trait of conscientiousness. We tested this hypothesis both at the broad domain level and with respect to the specific lower order facets that comprise conscientiousness: order, self-control, industriousness, responsibility, and traditionalism. METHODS A sam...

The current research sought to validate the Chernyshenko Conscientiousness Scales (CCS), a novel measure designed to assess six facets of conscientiousness. Data from 7,569 U.S. participants and 649 U.K. participants were analyzed to assess the internal reliability and factorial structure of the scales. Test-retest reliability, convergent and divergent validity, and criterion-related validity w...

The personality trait of conscientiousness is an important predictor of health and longevity. The present research examined how conscientiousness, in combination with educational attainment and health-related behaviours, predicted self-reported physical health across adulthood. These relations were investigated in two studies, one using a large, representative sample of Illinois residents (N = ...

Research has shown that sustained homework effort enhances academic performance and that students’ conscientiousness is a powerful predictor of students’ homework effort. But does homework—as homework proponents claim—in turn also influence the development of conscientiousness over time? In the present study, we examined whether students’ homework effort in two subjects (i.e., mathematics and l...

This study was designed to explore the relationships between sex, personality, and basic cognitive processes. Using a representative adult sample of 245 participants (M age = 47.80 years) with processing speed and short-term memory (STM) as the dependent variables, sex, and personality traits were entered into multiple regression analyses. Sex (female) and personality (high Extraversion) positi...

BACKGROUND Markers of executive functioning, such as prudent planning for the future and impulse control, are related to conscientiousness and may be central to both occupational success and health outcomes. PURPOSE The aim of the study was to examine relations among conscientiousness, career success, and mortality risk across a 65-year period. METHODS Using data derived from 693 male parti...

To help account for variability across studies in the predictive utility of conscientiousness, we proposed that conscientiousness and self-motivation mutually compensate for each other in predicting universitylevel academic performance. Consistent with this expectation, we found evidence of such mutual moderation in a sample of 377 college undergraduates. First, we found that conscientiousness ...