The emotional blink: Adult age differences in visual attention to emotional information.

To assess age differences in attention-emotion interactions, the authors asked young adults (ages 18-33 years) and older adults (ages 60-80 years) to identify target words in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. The second of two target words was neutral or emotional in content (positive in Experiment 1, negative in Experiment 2). In general, the ability to identify targets from a word stream declined with age. Age differences specific to the attentional blink were greatly reduced when baseline detection accuracy was equated between groups. With regard to emotion effects, older adults showed enhanced identification of both positive and negative words relative to neutral words, whereas young adults showed enhanced identification of positive words and reduced identification of negative words. Together these findings suggest that the nature of attention-emotion interactions changes with age, but there was little support for a motivational shift consistent with emotional regulation goals at an early stage of cognitive processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Older adults prefer less choice than young adults.

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults prefer less autonomy and seek less information when making decisions on their own relative to young adults (for a review, see M. Mather, 2006). Would older adults also prefer fewer options from which to choose? The authors tested this hypothesis in the context of different decision domains. Participants completed a choice preferences survey in which they indicated their desired number of choices across 6 domains of health care and everyday decisions. The hypothesis was confirmed across all decision domains. The authors discuss implications from these results as they relate to theories of aging and health care policy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memories of social interactions: Age differences in emotional intensity.

The current study examined age differences in the intensity of emotions experienced during social interactions. Because emotions are felt most intensely in situations central to motivational goals, age differences in emotional intensity may exist in social situations that meet the goals for one age group more than the other. Guided by theories of emotional intensity and socioemotional selectivity, it was hypothesized that social partner type would elicit different affective responses by age. Younger (n = 71) and older (n = 71) adults recalled experiences of positive and negative emotions with new friends, established friends, and family members from the prior week. Compared with younger adults, older adults reported lower intensity positive emotions with new friends, similarly intense positive emotions with established friends, and higher intensity positive emotions with family members. Older adults reported lower intensity negative emotions for all social partners than did younger adults, but this difference was most pronounced for interactions with new friends. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Getting the message across: Age differences in the positive and negative framing of health care messages.

Although valenced health care messages influence impressions, memory, and behavior (Levin, Schneider, & Gaeth, 1998) and the processing of valenced information changes with age (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005), these 2 lines of research have thus far been disconnected. This study examined impressions of, and memory for, positively and negatively framed health care messages that were presented in pamphlets to 25 older adults and 24 younger adults. Older adults relative to younger adults rated positive pamphlets more informative than negative pamphlets and remembered a higher proportion of positive to negative messages. However, older adults misremembered negative messages to be positive. These findings demonstrate the age-related positivity effect in health care messages with promise as to the persuasive nature and lingering effects of positive messages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Goal-directed memory: The role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory.

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in choice satisfaction: A positivity effect in decision making.

The authors tested the possibility that older adults show a positivity effect in decision making, by giving younger and older adults the opportunity to choose 1 of 4 products and by examining the participants' satisfaction with their choice. The authors considered whether requiring participants to explicitly evaluate the options before making a choice has an effect on age differences in choice satisfaction. Older adults in the evaluation condition listed more positive and fewer negative attributes than did younger adults and were more satisfied with their decisions than were younger adults. There were no age differences among those who did not evaluate options. This evaluation-dependent elevation of satisfaction among older adults was still present when participants were contacted 2 weeks after the experiment. Age did not influence the accuracy with which participants predicted how their satisfaction would change over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adult age differences in learning from positive and negative probabilistic feedback.

Objective: Past research has investigated age differences in frontal-based decision making, but few studies have focused on the behavioral effects of striatal-based changes in healthy aging. Feedback learning has been found to vary with dopamine levels; increases in dopamine facilitate learning from positive feedback, whereas decreases facilitate learning from negative feedback. Given previous evidence of striatal dopamine depletion in healthy aging, we investigated behavioral differences between college-aged and healthy older adults using a feedback learning task that is sensitive to both frontal and striatal processes. Method: Seventeen college-aged (M = 18.9 years) and 24 healthy, older adults (M = 70.3 years) completed the Probabilistic Selection task, in which participants are trained on probabilistic stimulus-outcome information and then tested to determine whether they learned more from positive or negative feedback. Results: As a group, the older adults learned equally well from positive and negative feedback, whereas the college-aged group learned more from positive than negative feedback, F(1, 39) = 4.10, p effect = .3. However, these group differences were not due to older individuals being more balanced learners. Most individuals of both ages were balanced learners, but while all of the remaining young learners had a positive bias, the remaining older learners were split between those with positive and negative learning biases (χ2(2) = 6.12, p     

Correction to Mikels et al. (2010).

Reports an error in "Following your heart or your head: Focusing on emotions versus information differentially influences the decisions of younger and older adults" by Joseph A. Mikels, Corinna E. L?ckenhoff, Sam J. Maglio, Laura L. Carstensen, Mary K. Goldstein and Alan Garber (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2010[Mar], Vol 16[1], 87-95). The wrong author order was listed. The correct order is presented in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2010-06152-007.) Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differential effects on decision quality among younger and older adults. We presented 60 younger and 60 older adults with health care choices that required them to hold in mind and consider multiple pieces of information. Instructional manipulations in the emotion-focus condition asked participants to focus on their emotional reactions to the options, report their feelings about the options, and then make a choice. In the information-focus condition, participants were instructed to focus on the specific attributes, report the details about the options, and then make a choice. In a control condition, no directives were given. Manipulation checks indicated that the instructions were successful in eliciting different modes of processing. Decision quality data indicate that younger adults performed better in the information-focus than in the control condition whereas older adults performed better in the emotion-focus and control conditions than in the information-focus condition. Findings support and extend extant theorizing on aging and decision making as well as suggest that interventions to improve decision-making quality should take the age of the decision maker into account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anger management: Age differences in emotional modulation of visual processing.

Although positive and negative images enhance the visual processing of young adults, recent work suggests that a life-span shift in emotion processing goals may lead older adults to avoid negative images. To examine this tendency for older adults to regulate their intake of negative emotional information, the current study investigated age-related differences in the perceptual boost received by probes appearing over facial expressions of emotion. Visually-evoked event-related potentials were recorded from the scalp over cortical regions associated with visual processing as a probe appeared over facial expressions depicting anger, sadness, happiness, or no emotion. The activity of the visual system in response to each probe was operationalized in terms of the P1 component of the event-related potentials evoked by the probe. For young adults, the visual system was more active (i.e., greater P1 amplitude) when the probes appeared over any of the emotional facial expressions. However, for older adults, the visual system displayed reduced activity when the probe appeared over angry facial expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and emotional memory: Cognitive mechanisms underlying the positivity effect.

Younger adults tend to remember negative information better than positive or neutral information (negativity bias). The negativity bias is reduced in aging, with older adults occasionally exhibiting superior memory for positive, as opposed to negative or neutral, information (positivity bias). Two experiments with younger (N = 24 in Experiment 1, N = 25 in Experiment 2; age range: 18?35 years) and older adults (N = 24 in both experiments; age range: 60?85 years) investigated the cognitive mechanisms responsible for age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional information. Results from diffusion model analyses (R. Ratcliff, 1978) indicated that the effects of valence on response bias were similar in both age groups but that Age × Valence interactions emerged in memory retrieval. Specifically, older adults experienced greater overall familiarity for positive items than younger adults. We interpret this finding in terms of an age-related increase in the accessibility of positive information in long-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and goal-directed emotional attention: Distraction reverses emotional biases.

Previous findings reveal that older adults favor positive over negative stimuli in both memory and attention (for a review, see Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This study used eye tracking to investigate the role of cognitive control in older adults' selective visual attention. Younger and older adults viewed emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional pairs of faces and pictures while their gaze patterns were recorded under full or divided attention conditions. Replicating previous eye-tracking findings, older adults allocated less of their visual attention to negative stimuli in negative-neutral stimulus pairings in the full attention condition than younger adults did. However, as predicted by a cognitive-control-based account of the positivity effect in older adults' information processing tendencies (Mather & Knight, 2005), older adults' tendency to avoid negative stimuli was reversed in the divided attention condition. Compared with younger adults, older adults' limited attentional resources were more likely to be drawn to negative stimuli when they were distracted. These findings indicate that emotional goals can have unintended consequences when cognitive control mechanisms are not fully available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in trade-off decisions: Older adults prefer choice deferral.

Our primary purpose in this study was to examine age differences in using choice deferral when young and older adults made trade-off decisions. Ninety-two young and 92 older adults were asked to make a trade-off decision among four cars or to use choice deferral (i.e., not buy any of these cars and keep looking for other cars). High and low emotional trade-off difficulty were manipulated between participants through different attribute labels of available cars. Older adults were more likely than young adults to choose deferral. Older adults who used deferral reported less retrospective negative emotion than those who did not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age and Regulatory Focus Determine Preferences for Health-Related Role Models.

The authors hypothesized that the effectiveness of role models varies across the adult life span because of differences in health-related regulatory orientations. Because young adults have strong health-related promotion orientations, they should be motivated by positive models who illustrate the benefits of good health. Because older adults have more balanced health-related promotion and prevention orientations, they should be motivated not only by positive models but also by negative models who illustrate the costs of poor health. Results indicated that both young and older adults perceived positive models to be motivating, but older adults found negative models to be more motivating than did young adults. Age differences in responses to negative models were partially mediated by differences in health-related prevention orientation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Following your heart or your head: Focusing on emotions versus information differentially influences the decisions of younger and older adults.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 16(2) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (see record 2010-12508-005). The wrong author order was listed. The correct order is presented in the erratum.] Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differential effects on decision quality among younger and older adults. We presented 60 younger and 60 older adults with health care choices that required them to hold in mind and consider multiple pieces of information. Instructional manipulations in the emotion-focus condition asked participants to focus on their emotional reactions to the options, report their feelings about the options, and then make a choice. In the information-focus condition, participants were instructed to focus on the specific attributes, report the details about the options, and then make a choice. In a control condition, no directives were given. Manipulation checks indicated that the instructions were successful in eliciting different modes of processing. Decision quality data indicate that younger adults performed better in the information-focus than in the control condition whereas older adults performed better in the emotion-focus and control conditions than in the information-focus condition. Findings support and extend extant theorizing on aging and decision making as well as suggest that interventions to improve decision-making quality should take the age of the decision maker into account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Providing mental health care to older adults: Unraveling the maze of Medicare and managed care.

This article reviews fundamental information about mental health benefits for older adults. Major systems, including Medicare, Medicaid, and managed care, are described. Regulations and policies that influence mental health care for older adults are distinct from those for the general population. In addition, Medicare has adopted managed-care options more recently than the private insurance industry. This relationship between Medicare and managed care is chronicled and future directions are postulated. Finally, we examine several empirical questions that have been raised due to the recent changes in the delivery of mental health care to older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The differential effects of mood on age differences in the correspondence bias.

The present study found that age-related differences in the correspondence bias were differentially influenced by induced mood. Young and older adults completed an attitude-attribution task after having been induced to experience a positive, neutral, or negative mood. Although negative moods intensified age-related differences in the correspondence bias, young and older adults were equally susceptible to the correspondence bias when in a positive mood. In addition, induced mood differentially influenced the attributional confidence of young and older adults. Whereas negatively induced young adults were less confident than positively induced young adults in their attributions, negatively induced older adults were more confident than positively induced older adults in their attributions. Findings are discussed in terms of how positive and negative moods operate differently in motivating young and older adults' attributional judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, source, and decision criteria: When false fame errors do and do not occur.

Two experiments investigated the influence of decision criteria on source memory performance of older adults and younger adults. Experiment 1 used the false fame paradigm, which encourages people to use relatively loose decision criteria when making what are, in essence, source judgments. Consistent with previous research, older adults made more false fame errors than younger adults. Experiment 2 was identical to Experiment 1 except that the fame judgments were made with the traditional source task format that encourages relatively stringent decision criteria when making source judgments: Possible sources were listed, and participants categorized names in terms of their source. In contrast to Experiment 1, older adults reduced their false fame errors to the level of younger adults. Encouraging older adults to use relatively stringent decision criteria when making source discriminations can reduce age differences in source misattributions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Docetaxel (taxotere, Rhone-Poulenc Rorer)

The oft quoted phrase, "There's no place like home," has no greater meaning than when long-term care decisions are being made. In the midst of ongoing late life changes, one's home is often the only anchor. Through carefully selected home care and nursing and care management services, living at home remains a viable option for older adults and their families. Physicians can serve as a vital link between older adults and the home care system by educating the patient where services can be obtained. Physician input into referral and collaboration with other care managers can help determine the best approach to home care.     

Why older adults make more immediate treatment decisions about cancer than younger adults.

Literature relevant to medical decision making was reviewed, and a model was outlined for testing. Two studies examined whether older adults make more immediate decisions than younger adults about treatments for prostate or breast cancer in authentic scenarios. Findings clearly showed that older adults were more likely to make immediate decisions than younger adults. The research is important because it not only demonstrates the consistency of this age-related effect across disease domains, gender, ethnic groups, and prevalent education levels but begins to investigate a model to explain the effect. Major reasons for the effect focus on treatment knowledge, interest and engagement, and cognitive resources. Treatment knowledge, general cancer knowledge, interest, and cognitive resources relate to different ways of processing treatment information and preferences for immediate versus delayed decision making. Adults with high knowledge of treatments on a reliable test tended to make immediate treatment decisions, which supports the knowledge explanation. Adults with more cognitive resources and more interest tended to delay their treatment decisions. Little support was found for a cohort explanation for the relationship between age and preference for immediate medical decision making. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of age on cross-modal emotion perception.

Efficient navigation of our social world depends on the generation, interpretation, and combination of social signals within different sensory systems. However, the influence of healthy adult aging on multisensory integration of emotional stimuli remains poorly explored. This article comprises 2 studies that directly address issues of age differences on cross-modal emotional matching and explicit identification. The first study compared 25 younger adults (19–40 years) and 25 older adults (60–80 years) on their ability to match cross-modal congruent and incongruent emotional stimuli. The second study looked at performance of 20 younger (19–40) and 20 older adults (60–80) on explicit emotion identification when information was presented congruently in faces and voices or only in faces or in voices. In Study 1, older adults performed as well as younger adults on tasks in which congruent auditory and visual emotional information were presented concurrently, but there were age-related differences in matching incongruent cross-modal information. Results from Study 2 indicated that though older adults were impaired at identifying emotions from 1 modality (faces or voices alone), they benefited from congruent multisensory information as age differences were eliminated. The findings are discussed in relation to social, emotional, and cognitive changes with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)