Understanding cognitive mechanisms of emotion regulation in aging

描述（由申请人提供）：随着婴儿潮一代成长为老年人，65岁以上的美国人数量在未来20年内增长175%，到2030年，老年人将占人口的20%。因此，了解支持他们情绪健康和幸福的心理和神经机制是至关重要的。令人高兴的是，虽然认知能力下降，但老年人在日常生活中报告了更多的积极情绪，并优先注意和记住积极的刺激和事件。完全 然而，为什么老年人表现出这些积极的偏见还不清楚。在可能的原因中，老年人如何调节他们的情绪已被提出作为一个潜在的关键因素，需要进一步研究。有证据表明，老年人有长期激活的目标来调节他们的情绪，并有效地使用策略，这些策略影响他们将自己置于其中的情况，他们如何照顾他们，以及他们的情绪如何表现在公开的行为中。然而，一个人不能-也许不应该-总是试图避免，修改，忽视或抑制表达反应的压力健康/死亡相关的情况下，成为频繁的老年人。另一种调节选择是使用重新评价，这是一种认知策略，改变一个人对事件的解释会改变一个人对事件的情绪反应。重新评价是维持心理、身体和社会健康的最有效和最有益的调节策略之一。不幸的是，目前还不清楚老年人是否擅长使用重新评估，以及什么心理和神经机制决定了他们的重新评估技能水平。在为数不多的几项研究中，一些研究关注的是衰老过程中的重新评估，其中一些研究表明存在损伤，另一些则没有。在这里，我们使用功能性磁共振成像系统地检查老年人是否，何时以及为什么在重新评估中有效。因此，该提案直接响应了FOA PAR- 11-337的要求，即在行为、心理和神经生物学水平上研究与衰老相关的社会、情感和认知行为。在一个支持年轻人有效重新评价的神经系统模型的指导下，我们将检验关于重新评价能力在衰老过程中可能受损或完好的背景的假设。我们假设，老年人能够有效地重新评价的程度取决于两种因素，每一种因素都是我们特定目标的焦点。在目标1下，我们将进行两个实验，研究老年人重新评价的能力在多大程度上取决于所采用的重新评价策略/战术中涉及的特定认知过程。在目标2下，我们将进行另外两个实验，询问老年人重新评价的能力如何取决于他们减少或增加情绪的目标，以及他们的长期调节目标是否会导致他们有效地启动自己的调节。所有这些 这些研究对于理解老年人正常和异常的情绪健康状况具有重要意义，并促进干预措施的发展，以提高老年人的健康水平和科普与身体和认知能力下降有关的压力的能力。 年龄

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As the baby boomers grow into older adulthood, the number of Americans aged 65+ rises 175% over the next twenty years when older adults will comprise ~20% of the population by the year 2030. As such, understanding the psychological and neural mechanisms supporting their emotional health and well-being is of the utmost importance. Happily, while cognitive abilities decline, older adults report more positive emotion in their daily lives and preferentially attend to and remember positive stimuli and events. Exactly why older adults exhibit these positivity biases is not yet clear, however. Among the possible reasons, how older adults regulate their emotion has been advanced as a potentially key factor in need of further investigation. Evidence suggests that older adults have chronically activated goals to regulate their emotion and effectively use strategies that influence the situations in which they place themselves, how they attend to them, and how their emotions manifest in overt behavior. However, one can't - and perhaps shouldn't - always try to avoid, modify, ignore or suppress expressive responses to the stressful health/mortality-related situations that become frequent in older age. Another regulatory option would be to use reappraisal, a cognitive strategy whereby changing one's interpretation of events changes one's emotional responses to them. Reappraisal is among the most effective and beneficial regulatory strategies for maintaining mental, physical and social health. Unfortunately, it isn't yet clear whether older adults are adept at using reappraisal, and what psychological and neural mechanisms determine their level of reappraisal skill. Of the few studies focusing on reappraisal in aging, some suggest impairment and others do not. Here we use fMRI to systematically examine whether, when and why older adults are effective at reappraisal. As such, this proposal responds directly to FOA PAR- 11-337's's call for applications that examine social, affective and cognitive behaviors of relevance to aging at the behavioral, psychological and neurobiological levels. Guided by a model of the neural systems supporting effective reappraisal in young adults, we will test hypotheses about the contexts where reappraisal ability could be impaired - or intact - in aging. We hypothesize that the extent to which an older adult can effectively reappraise depends on two kinds of factors, each a focus of one of our Specific Aims. Under Aim 1 we will conduct two experiments examining the extent to which older adults ability to reappraise depends on specific cognitive processes involved in the reappraisal strategies/tactics that are deployed. Under Aim 2 we will conduct two more experiments asking how older adults ability to reappraise depends on their goals to decrease or increase emotion, and whether their chronic regulatory goals lead them to effectively initiate regulation on their own. Together, these studies could have important implications for understanding both normal and abnormal emotional health in older age and foster development of interventions that enhance well- being and the ability to cope with the stress associated with the physical and cognitive decline of older age.