The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) is an ongoing multidisciplinary study of community-dwelling volunteers. Personality traits were assessed from 1989 to 2008, and multiple assessments were available for most participants. Although personality traits are generally stable over time50,51, to provide more robust estimates, we used the average across all available assessments. For the current study, we examined data from 848 subjects of European descent that were successfully genotyped and completed the NEO-PI-R questionnaire at least once. In this sample, mean age was 68.5 (SD = 17) with 46% of women. The mean age of the men was 60.8 years (SD=16), and of the women 55.9 years (SD=17).
