Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Affective Forecasting Across the Lifespan

最近的衰老和预测文献证实了这样一种观点，即目标取向的变化以及情感预测的错误可能会在一生中有所不同。然而，尽管文献中有这些重要的建议，但很少有实证研究直接比较老年人和年轻人的情感体验和情感预测，也没有人研究这一领域中可能解释年龄差异的潜在机制。本研究厘清目标定向、情绪调节和情绪预测之间的关系，并探讨这种关系是否与老年人对情绪信息的保留和记忆中发现的积极效应一致。具体地说，三项研究在18-90岁的成年人中评估了情绪调节和目标定向对年龄相关情感预测能力的调节作用。前两项研究确定了构建预测的过程，并测试了一种假设，即如果老年人往往比年轻人或中年人更注重预防，他们的预测可能是基于避免招致损失的动机，而不是以实现收益为导向。第三个研究在前两个研究的基础上，考察了年龄差异在时间折扣领域的情感标准中的作用，并将采用询问顺序干预，目的是减少预测偏差的影响。情感变量在决策过程中起主要作用，而决策情感方面的年龄差异对选择结果具有重要影响。通过了解影响动力学的哪些组成部分导致成年人在一生中做出更好的决定，结果将为发展能够改善老年人福利的干预措施提供方向。

Recent aging and forecasting literature gives plausibility to the idea that changes in goal orientation, as well as errors in affective forecasting, may differ across the lifespan. Yet despite these important suggestions from the literature, little empirical research has directly compared experienced affect and affective forecasting in older and younger adults, and none has examined underlying mechanisms that may account for age differences in this domain. This project clarifies the relationship between goal orientation, emotional regulation, and affective forecasting, and explore whether this relationship is consistent with the positivity effect found in elders' retention and memory for emotional information. Specifically, three studies assess mediation of age-related affective forecasting ability by emotional regulation and goal orientation in adults between 18-90 years of age. The first two studies identify the processes in which forecasts are constructed, and test the hypothesis that if older adults tend to be more prevention-oriented than young or middle-aged adults, their forecasts may be based on the motivation to avoid incurring losses versus an orientation towards achieving gains. The third study builds upon the findings from the first two studies by examining the role of age-differences in affective criteria in the domain of temporal discounting, and will employ a query order intervention, with the purpose of reducing the influence of forecasting biases.Affective variables play a major role in decision processes, and age differences in emotional aspects of decision making have important implications for choice outcomes. By understanding what components of affect dynamics lead adults across the lifespan to make better decisions, results will provide directions for the development of interventions that can improve the welfare of older adults.