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）涉及对决策选择的想法和感受，但对于影响（感觉或情感评估）和考虑如何在这种人类判断和决策过程中相互作用，特别是在老年人中，所知相对较少。在本研究中，我们采用了一种新的视角来考察思想和情感在决策过程中是如何相互作用的。人类的决策是一个复杂的现象，涉及多种因素，可能随着年龄的增长而变化。通过研究老年人和年轻人如何以不同的方式做决定，我们可以建立更好的理论，了解我们的判断和决策是如何随着年龄的增长而变化的。我们认为，老年人的判断和决定（与年轻人相比）可能较少受到深思熟虑的影响，而更多地受到情感的影响。因此，老年人可能会做出与年轻人不同的决定（有时更好，有时更差）。这笔资金将使我们能够在最近的发现基础上进行实验，这些发现是关于情感和深思在老年人和年轻人的判断和决策过程中所起的作用。这项研究将增加关于情感和审慎思维方式如何相互作用并遵循特定发展路径的知识体系。研究老年人的判断和决策过程具有很强的现实意义，因为老年人做出的决策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会为帮助和改进决策指明道路，从而带来巨大的实际好处。除了这些实际的好处之外，将决策研究与年龄相关的记忆、情感和其他心理过程变化的研究相结合，可能会对老年人和年轻人的判断和决策机制产生重要的科学见解。

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.