Participants completed the self-report version of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R).5 The NEO-PI-R is a 240-item questionnaire that assesses 30 facets, six for each of the five major dimensions of personality – neuroticism (the tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anxiety, anger, and sadness), extraversion (an inclination toward being sociable, assertive, enthusiastic, and energetic), openness (the tendency to be imaginative, unconventional, curious, emotionally and artistically sensitive), agreeableness (an interpersonal dimension defined by altruism, trust, modesty and cooperativeness), and conscientiousness (the tendency to be organized, strong-willed, persistent, reliable and a follower of rules and ethical principles). Raw scores were standardized using combined-sex norms reported in the manual.5 In the BLSA sample, the NEO-PI-R factor structure shows high congruence with the normative structure (Tucker’s phis = .97 to .99), the internal consistencies for the five dimensions ranged from 0.87 to 0.92, and the test-retest correlations for the five dimensions ranged from 0.78 to 0.85 over an average interval of 10 years.26
