Anger expression moderates the effects of neighborhood disadvantage on cognitive decline among African‐Americans in the Jackson Heart Study and Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study

Abstract

AbstractBackgroundPrevious research has identified neighborhoods and individual psychosocial characteristics such as anger expression as important contributors to cognitive health. However, less is known about whether neighborhood environments interact with individual psychosocial characteristics to confer increased susceptibility to adverse cognitive outcomes such as accelerated cognitive decline. We tested the hypothesis that internalized anger will strengthen the associations between neighborhood disadvantage and faster rates of cognitive decline.MethodAmong 1,314 African Americans dually enrolled in two community‐based cohorts in Jackson, Mississippi—the ARIC and JHS cohort studies—a factor score of global cognitive function was calculated based on ten cognitive tests of working memory, language, and executive function administered repeatedly from 1996 to 2019. Age‐ and sex‐adjusted linear mixed effects models were used to examine whether individual‐level anger expression moderated the associations of four measures of census tract‐level neighborhood socioeconomic and social environment characteristics (the national Area Deprivation Index (ADI), a JHS neighborhood disadvantage score, racial residential segregation, and perceived physical disorder) with individual‐level cognitive decline.ResultOf the four neighborhood characteristics, greater JHS neighborhood disadvantage and racial residential segregation were associated with faster rates of 10‐year cognitive decline. Among those with high inward anger expression (>1 SD above the mean), there was a 33% and 35% faster rate of decline in global cognition associated with higher neighborhood disadvantage (as measured by the JHS score) and segregation, respectively (Table).ConclusionDispositional inward anger expression may increase susceptibility to the detrimental impacts of neighborhood disadvantage on cognitive health.