Age Differences in Reactions to Social Rejection: The Role of Cognitive Resources and Appraisals.

Intrusive thoughts and attempts to suppress them are common, but while suppression may be effective in the short-term, it can increase thought recurrence in the long-term. Because intentional suppression involves controlled processing, and many aspects of controlled processing decline with age, age differences in thought suppression outcomes may emerge, especially over repeated thought suppression attempts as cognitive resources are expended. Using multilevel modeling, we examined age differences in reactions to thought suppression attempts across four thought suppression sequences in 40 older and 42 younger adults. As expected, age differences were more prevalent during suppression than during free monitoring periods, with younger adults indicating longer, more frequent thought recurrences and greater suppression difficulty. Further, younger adults’ thought suppression outcomes changed over time, while trajectories for older adults’ were relatively stable. Results are discussed in terms of older adults’ reduced thought recurrence, which was potentially afforded by age-related changes in reactive control and distractibility.

Speechreading and Aging

Aging society and climate change have emerged as two pressing concerns in modern society. However, questions remain unsolved regarding whether older and younger adults engage in pro-environmental behavior with different frequencies and/or out of different motivations. In the current study, we examined age differences in pro-environmental behaviors, as well as two underlying motivations: self-relevance and self-transcendence motivations. The former is defined as the extent to which people feel personally harmed or worried by climate change (i.e., ecological risk perceptions), and the latter is defined as the extent to which people hold concerns about the next generation. According to the positivity effect in the aging process and the socioemotional selectivity theory, older age could be correlated with lower risk perceptions and higher generativity concerns. These factors indicate opposing directions in age-related differences in pro-environmental behaviors. We conducted a survey among 126 older adults (Mean age = 70.65, SD = 5.12, 61.5% females) and 117 younger adults (Mean age = 25.43, SD = 5.93, 67.2% females). The results revealed that older adults engaged in pro-environmental behaviors more frequently and scored higher on social generativity concerns compared to younger adults. However, no significant age difference was found in ecological risk perceptions. Moreover, social generativity concerns positively correlated with pro-environmental behaviors only among younger adults, but not among older adults. Ecological risk perceptions positively correlated with pro-environmental behaviors among both younger and older adults. These results provide insights into different approaches for encouraging pro-environmental behaviors among younger and older adults.

ABSTRACTBackground/Study Context: While most aging research on memory uses a retention interval of one hour or less, episodic consolidation takes longer (e.g., 6–24 hours for synaptic consolidation). In three experiments, we examined age differences in recall followed by recognition in which the retention interval was varied in younger and older adults.Methods: In Experiment 1 (n = 24 for both age groups), zero-, 1- and 24-hour retention intervals were used for recall for all participants, and a 24-hour retention interval was used for recognition. In Experiment 2 (n = 24 for both age groups), just a 24-hour retention interval was used. In Experiment 3 (n = 20 for both age groups), a within-subjects design was used in which participants recalled one word list after one hour and again after 24 hours, and recalled another word list just after 24 hours (with recognition for both conditions after the 24-hour recall).Results: In Experiment 1, older adults recalled fewer words at both the 1- and 24-hour retention intervals, but the magnitude of the age difference did not differ. In Experiment 2 (just 24-hour retention interval), there were no age differences in recall. In Experiment 3, in the two-recall condition, older adults showed lower recall at both 1-hour and 24-hour retention intervals (but the magnitude of the age difference remained constant across retention interval). In the single-recall just 24-hour retention condition, there were no age differences. There were no age differences in recognition in any of the three experiments.Conclusion: These results suggest that recall declines for a 24-hour retention interval relative to a zero or one-hour retention interval (Experiments 1 and 3) for both age groups. However, when the first recall attempt occurs after a 24-hour retention interval, there are no age differences. These replicated results suggest that older adults do not benefit as much as younger adults from pre-consolidated rehearsal, but that rehearsal-based age differences do not increase in magnitude from the last rehearsal to memory consolidation. Furthermore, (along with), the present results indicate that there are no age differences in recall when the first recall attempt occurs after a long retention interval – when memory consolidation is likely to have occurred before the first retrieval attempt.

This article reports on a study undertaken to examine age differences in the effects of stress on risky decisions, such as deciding whether to brake or accelerate as one drives up to a traffic light that has turned yellow (amber). The authors had younger adults (aged 18-33 years; N=45; 22 males) and older adults (aged 65-89 years; N=40; 21 males) play a computer-based driving game either after a stress challenge or in a control condition. The study included 15 driving game trials in which drivers accumulated points by getting their simulated vehicle stopped before the traffic light turned red. Participants randomly assigned to the stress condition submerged their non-dominant hand in ice water (2.0 to 4.2 C) for three minutes. In the control condition, participants held their hand in warm water (37.3 C to 38.8 C) for three minutes. They started the driving game 18 min after the stress challenge, during the period of peak cortisol response to acute stress. Compared with the control group, the stress group’s salivary cortisol levels increased by the time of the game for both younger and older adults, with no significant age difference in the increase. The stress condition also resulted in higher post-experiment self-ratings of stress during the water task for both younger and older adults. Being stressed reduced older adults' final scores by nearly half, but did not significantly affect younger adults' scores. Stressed older adults risked driving for a smaller proportion of the yellow light. Stress also increased older adults’ stopping rate, but did not significantly affect younger adults’ stopping rate. Overall, older adults had fewer losing trials (M = 27%) than younger adults (M = 41%), but there were no effects of stress on losing rates. Consistent effects of stress were found on driving time, stopping rate and points throughout the game. The authors conclude that their results reveal that stress can change older adults’ decision strategies. After a stress challenge, older adults not only risked significantly less driving time but also stopped and restarted more frequently than those in the control condition. The age differences in the effects of stress were robust, occurring even when each sub-phase of the game was analyzed separately and when male and female data were analyzed separately. They call for addition research using different measures of risky decision making to see if these age differences are specific to risky decisions made under time pressure (as in the current task) or also extend to other decision tasks.

After learning about facts or outcomes of events, people overestimate in hindsight what they knew in foresight. Prior research has shown that this hindsight bias is more pronounced in older than in younger adults. However, this robust finding is based primarily on a specific paradigm that requires generating and recalling numerical judgments to general knowledge questions that deal with emotionally neutral content. As older and younger adults tend to process positive and negative information differently, they might also show differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes. Furthermore, hindsight bias can manifest itself as a bias in memory for prior given judgments, but also as retrospective impressions of inevitability and foreseeability. Currently, there is no research on age differences in all three manifestations of hindsight bias. In this study, younger (N = 46, 18–30 years) and older adults (N = 45, 64–90 years) listened to everyday-life scenarios that ended positively or negatively, recalled the expectation they previously held about the outcome (to measure the memory component of hindsight bias), and rated each outcome’s foreseeability and inevitability. Compared with younger adults, older adults recalled their prior expectations as closer to the actual outcomes (i.e., they showed a larger memory component of hindsight bias), and this age difference was more pronounced for negative than for positive outcomes. Inevitability and foreseeability impressions, however, did not differ between the age groups. Thus, there are age differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes, but only with regard to memory for prior judgments.

In this study, we hypothesized that there is an age difference in the influence of negative emotion on decision-making and that this age difference is related to emotion regulation strategies. We carried out two studies. In the first, the older and younger adults completed the ultimatum game (UG) while in either an induced negative emotional or a neutral context. In the second, both the older and younger adults completed the UG while in an induced negative emotion while using either emotion reappraisal or expressive suppression to regulate their emotions during the task. The first study showed that, unlike younger adults, the older adults made similar choices in the neutral and negative induction groups. In addition, the older adults predominantly used a reappraisal strategy in both the negative and neutral emotional states, whereas the younger adults predominantly used a suppression strategy in the negative emotional state. In the second study, after the emotion regulation strategies were experimentally manipulated so that both age groups used the same strategy, we found no age difference in decision-making. Our findings indicated that the influence of negative emotion on decision-making differs between older and younger adults and that this age difference was associated with their different emotion regulation processes.

We examined age differences in the perception of emotion from facial expressions, testing the impact of future time perspective on positivity effects and emotion complexity. Perception of emotion was assessed in older (n = 111) and younger (n = 127) adults using facial expressions depicting clearly expressed and ambiguous emotions. A more open-ended judgment paradigm was used, and time perspective was experimentally manipulated. Older adults perceived more positive affect in the expressions compared with younger adults. Ambiguity of the expression modulated these age differences, as older adults perceived more positive emotion in ambiguous expressions compared with younger adults. Emotion complexity emerged only in perception of negative expressions, with older adults seeing more mixed affect in the clear expressions than younger adults. Manipulation of future time perspective eliminated age differences in perception of positive affect. Age differences in the perception of emotional expressions showed positivity effects, especially for ambiguous facial expressions. These effects were related to time perspective rather than to age per se. The understanding of the positivity effect in older adults needs to consider the proposed causal role of limited time perspective rather than assuming positivity effects in all older adults.

Age differences in the spatial distribution of attention over a wide field of view have only been described in terms of the spatial extent, leaving the topographical aspect unexplored. This study examined age differences between younger and older adults in good general health in an important topographical characteristic, the asymmetry between the upper and lower visual fields. In Experiment 1, we found age differences across the entire attentional visual field. In addition, age differences were greater in the upper compared to the lower field. In Experiment 2, we examined whether the finding of a greater age difference in the ability to localize a target among distractors in the upper visual field in Experiment 1 was a result of possible differential age differences between the upper and lower visual fields in the ability to localize a target even when there was no distractor competing for attention. Our results suggested that the age differences we observed were linked to age differences in the ability to filter out distractors that compete with the target for attention rather than the ability to process only the target over a wide field of view. While younger adults demonstrated an upper visual field advantage in the ability to localize a target among distractors, there was no such field advantage in older adults. We discuss this finding of diminished upper visual field advantage in older adults in light of an account of pervasive loss of neural specialization with age. We postulate that one possible explanation of age differences in the asymmetry between the upper and lower visual fields may be an adaptation to age-related physical decline. We also discuss important implications of our findings in risks of falls and vehicle crashes.

People may remember events inaccurately after being exposed to misleading information. This can lead to false memories being reported in multiple interviews. The higher the attentional salience of the original event information (i.e., the extent to which it strongly captures attention during encoding), the less likely young adults are to form false memories. However, it was unknown whether this would also apply to older adults across multiple memory assessments. This study used the misinformation paradigm to examine age differences in memory accuracy and consistency in two recognition tests. It also investigated how attentional salience of the original information influenced memory performances. Thirty young adults (aged 23 ± 2 years) and 30 older adults (aged 70 ± 3 years) saw images of original events, then read misleading narratives, and finally completed a verbal recognition test and a pictorial recognition test based on what they had seen in the original events. Results showed that older adults reported more false memories than young adults in both tests. Older adults were less consistent in reporting true memories across two tests, but there was no age difference in the consistency of false memories. Greater attentional salience helped young and older adults report more original information and less misinformation, though the effect was weaker in older adults. It also helped young and older adults report original information more consistently across tests. Overall, this study showed that how well the original information was encoded significantly influenced eyewitness reports across interviews in young and older adults.

Age differences in the functional interactions among the default, frontoparietal control, and dorsal attention networks

The current study examines how the aging relevance of anxiety triggers, particularly those tied to physical threat, influences the expression of anxiety in older and younger adults. It was expected that older adults would exhibit less anxiety than younger adults in response to nonphysical triggers but that this age-related difference would diminish when faced with physical triggers. Anxiety responses were measured in older (N = 49, ages 60-85) and younger (N = 49, ages 17-34) adults in response to (a) physical and social anxiety provocations, and (b) a threat interpretation measure. Consistent with hypotheses, results for the anxiety provocations indicated less anxiety among older (vs. younger) adults on a range of anxiety measures (affective, cognitive, physiological) when triggers did not concern physical health, but this age difference diminished when physical health was threatened. Older adults actually reported more threat interpretations than younger adults to physical threat scenarios. Findings are discussed in terms of the aging relevance of anxiety triggers and theoretical accounts of age-related changes in emotional processing.

We separate for the first time the roles of cognitive and motivational factors in shaping age differences in decision making under risk. Younger and older adults completed gain, loss, and mixed-domain choice problems as well as measures of cognitive functioning and affect. The older adults’ decision quality was lower than the younger adults’ in the loss domain, and this age difference was attributable to the older adults’ lower cognitive abilities. In addition, the older adults chose the more risky option more often than the younger adults in the gain and mixed domains; this difference in risk aversion was attributable to less pronounced negative affect among the older adults. Computational modeling with a hierarchical Bayesian implementation of cumulative prospect theory revealed that the older adults had higher response noise and more optimistic decision weights for gains than did the younger adults. Moreover, the older adults showed no loss aversion, a finding that supports a positivity-focus (rather than a loss-prevention) view of motivational reorientation in older age.

Older adults tend to have lower emotion-perception accuracy compared to younger adults. Previous studies have centered on individual characteristics, including cognitive decline and positive attentional preferences, as possible mechanisms underlying these age differences in emotion perception; however, thus far, no perceiver-focused factor has accounted for the age differences. The present study focuses on perceived social-context factors and uses the Social Input Model as the framework for investigating the relation between the expressivity of the social environment and emotion-perception accuracy in younger and older adults. Younger (n = 32) and older adults (n = 29) reported on the make-up of their social circles and the expressivity of their three closest social partners and then completed a static facial emotion-perception task. Older adults reported greater positive and negative expressivity in their social partners compared to younger adults. Moreover, older adults were marginally less accurate than younger adults when perceiving emotions. Positive expressivity of the social partners predicted lower emotion-perception accuracy in younger but not older adults. Our findings mark the first step to identifying possible characteristics of the social environment that may contribute to the age difference in emotion-perception accuracy.

Older adults consistently report a lower likelihood of engaging in health and safety risks (e.g., substance use, not wearing seatbelts) than younger adults. However, the mechanisms that explain this age difference are not clear. Greater dispositional mindfulness is associated with lower engagement in health risk behaviors, and older adults tend to score higher in dispositional mindfulness than younger adults. Thus, we tested whether older adults’ greater dispositional mindfulness helped to explain their lesser health and safety risk-taking propensity. Two community-dwelling samples of younger (25–36 years) and older (60+ years) adults completed self-report measures of dispositional mindfulness and health and safety risk-taking propensity. In Study 1, older adults reported greater dispositional mindfulness and a lower likelihood to engage in health and safety risk behaviors than younger adults. Greater dispositional mindfulness was associated with lesser health and safety risk-taking propensity. Importantly, older adults’ greater dispositional mindfulness partially accounted for their lesser health and safety risk-taking propensity. These findings were replicated in Study 2, and an alternative mechanism (i.e., perceived health) was ruled out. The results suggest that age-related decreases in health and safety risk behaviors may be statistically explained, in part, by dispositional mindfulness. The current research has implications for behavioral interventions intended to increase preventative health behaviors and decrease health risk behaviors.