 38. Personality Interventions  799
blood pressure compared to a control group 
(Gidron, Davidson, & Bata, 1999).
Exercise interventions are some of the 
most frequent and effective health interven -
tions. In terms of psychological benefits, ex -
ercise impacts phenomena related to person -
ality, including positive and negative affect 
(Trost, Owen, Bauman, Sallis, & Brown, 
2002; Reed & Ones, 2006), depression 
(Carek, Laibstain, & Carek, 2011), anxiety 
(De Moor, Beem, Stubbe, Boomsma, & De 
Geus, 2006), and psychological well-being 
(Netz, Wu, Becker, & Tenenbaum, 2005). 
Several meta-  analyses and reviews have con -
cluded that exercise reduces the symptoms 
of depression at levels comparable to those 
achieved by antidepressant medications 
(Bridle, Spanjers, Patel, Atherton, & Lamb, 
2012). Together these findings indicate that 
extraversion and neuroticism could be im -
pacted by an exercise intervention.
Exercise also affects cognitive function -
ing. Compared to older adults who are 
sedentary, active older adults exhibit bet -
ter executive control (Colcombe & Kramer, 
2003), processing speed (Smith et al., 2010), 
and memory (Hindin & Zelinski, 2012; P. 
Smith et al., 2010). Cognitive control has 
been linked to conscientiousness (Bogg & 
Finn, 2010), while processing speed (Bates 
& Shieles, 2003) and memory (Kaufman, 
2013) have been linked to openness, sug -
gesting that cognitive improvements may 
be associated with concomitant personality 
changes.
Cognitive  Training
There are many attempts at interventions to 
thwart the seemingly inevitable decline in 
cognitive ability as one ages. These interven -
tions usually involve training in one particu -
lar cognitive domain or task, usually for a 
period of weeks or months. Training inter -
ventions are found to be effective inasmuch 
as people are able to increase the cognitive 
domain for which they have trained, but 
there is little evidence for widespread trans -
fer to other domains (Hertzog et al., 2008). 
While cognitive training does not have wide -
spread effects for all cognitive abilities, there 
are some indications that the changes within 
a domain are associated with changes in personality. Jackson, Hill, Payne, Roberts, 
and Stine-  Morrow (2012) found that older 
adults who performed inductive reasoning 
training over 16 sessions, along with cross -
word and Sudoku puzzles in which difficulty 
level matched with skill level, increased in 
openness to experiences compared to an ac -
tive control group. Presumably, participants 
valued the accomplishment of working 
through the puzzles week after week, thus 
feeling more capable and comfortable with 
cognitively challenging tasks. It is unclear 
however, whether these self-  reported chang -
es lead to observable behavior changes.
Following up on this work, Sander, 
Schmiedek, Brose, Wagner, and Specht 
(2017) conducted an extensive cognitive 
training intervention (memory and percep -
tual speed) over the course of 100 days with 
more than 1 hour per day devoted to cog -
nitive training. In contrast to Jackson et al. 
(2012), no changes in openness due to cogni -
tive training were found. It is unclear wheth -
er changes in openness did occur but only 
changed temporarily, as personality was 
only assessed at a 2-year follow-  up. While 
the intervention was not associated with 
openness, it was associated with increases in 
memory and perceptual speed and decreases 
in conscientiousness.
Coaching
A response to the success of clinical inter -
ventions, paired with overwhelming desire 
for many people to change nonclinical fea -
tures, is the development of coaching pro -
grams to change personality. Coaching pro -
grams identify aspects of personality that a 
person wants to change, then guides them 
through the change process based on prin -
ciples of therapy (Allemand & Flückiger, 
2017). Some success has been achieved using 
short-term interventions. For example, over 
15 weeks, people changed their personality 
via weekly challenges, in which participants 
were coached to act in accordance with 
the trait pole they wanted to change (Hud -
son, Briley, Chopik, & Derringer, 2019). 
Similarly, a 10-week coaching program ex -
tended the idea of behaving in accordance 
with trait manifestations by working with a 
coach to identify roadblocks of behaving in 