Dissociating Affect and Deliberation in Choice Processes

虽然我们这个时代的许多最重要的问题（例如，清理核废料场或选择医疗程序）涉及对决策选项的想法和感受，但对影响（感受或情感评估）和深思熟虑如何在这种人类判断和决策过程中相互作用知之甚少，特别是在老年人中。在拟议的研究中，我们使用一个新的视角来研究思想和情感如何在决策中相互作用。 人类决策是一种复杂的现象，涉及多个可能随年龄变化的组成部分。 通过研究老年人和年轻人如何以不同的方式做出决定，我们可以建立更好的理论来解释我们的判断和决策如何随着年龄的增长而变化。 我们认为，老年人的判断和决定（与年轻人相比）可能受深思熟虑的影响较小，而受影响较大。 因此，老年人可能会做出与年轻人不同的决定（有时更好，有时更糟）。这笔赠款的资金将使我们能够进行实验，这些实验建立在最近关于影响和审议在老年人和年轻人的判断和决策过程中的作用的研究结果的基础上。这项研究将增加越来越多的知识，关于情感和深思熟虑的思维方式如何相互作用，并遵循特定的发展路径。研究老年人的判断和决策过程具有很强的实际意义，因为老年人所做的决定的质量会影响他们所经历的生活质量。提高我们对老年人决策的理解无疑将为帮助和改善决策指明道路，从而带来巨大的实际好处。 除了这些实际的好处，协调决策研究与年龄相关的变化的记忆，影响和其他心理过程的研究可能会产生重要的科学见解的机制，根据老年人和年轻人的判断和决定。

Although many of the most important issues of our time (e.g., cleaning up a nuclear waste site or choosing a medical procedure) involve thoughts and feelings about decision options, relatively little is known about how affect (feelings or emotional evaluations) and deliberation interact in such human judgment and decision processes, particularly among older adults. In the proposed research, we use a new perspective to examine how thoughts and feelings interact in decision making. Human decision making is a complex phenomenon involving multiple components that may change with age. By examining how older and younger adults make decisions in different ways, we can build better theories of how our judgment and decision making might change as we age. We suggest that the judgments and decisions of older adults (compared to younger adults) may be influenced less by deliberation and more by affect. As a result, older adults may produce different decisions than younger adults (sometimes better, sometimes worse). Funding from this grant will allow us to pursue experiments that build on recent findings about the role of affect and deliberation in the judgment and decision-making processes of older and younger adults. This research will add to the growing body of knowledge concerning how affective and deliberative ways of thinking may interact and follow particular developmental paths. Studying the judgment and decision processes of older adults has strong practical implications since the quality of the decisions that older adults make impacts the quality of life that they experience. Improving our understanding of older adult decision making will undoubtedly provide great practical benefits by pointing the way toward aiding and improving decisions. In addition to these practical benefits, coordinating decision-making research with studies of age-related changes in memory, affect, and other psychological processes may produce important scientific insights into the mechanisms that underlie the judgments and decisions of older and younger adults.