Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Affective Forecasting Across the Lifespan

最近的老龄化和预测文献给出了合理性的想法，目标取向的变化，以及情感预测的错误，可能会在整个生命周期不同。然而，尽管这些重要的建议，从文献中，很少有实证研究直接比较了经验丰富的影响和情感预测在老年人和年轻人，没有检查潜在的机制，可能占在这一领域的年龄差异。本研究厘清目标定向、情绪调节与情绪预测之间的关系，并探讨此关系是否与老年人情绪信息保持与记忆中的正性效应相一致。具体而言，三项研究评估了18-90岁成年人的情绪调节和目标定向对年龄相关情感预测能力的中介作用。前两项研究确定了预测的过程，并检验了假设，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遭受损失的动机，而不是实现收益的取向。第三项研究建立在前两项研究的结果，通过检查的作用，年龄差异的情感标准的域的时间折扣，并将采用查询顺序干预，目的是减少预测bias.Affective变量的影响，在决策过程中发挥了重要作用，决策的情感方面的年龄差异有重要的影响选择的结果。通过了解影响动态的哪些组成部分导致成年人在整个生命周期中做出更好的决定，结果将为制定可以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.