Social Cognition and Aging

描述（由申请人提供）：随着平均寿命的增加，与决策能力有关的问题在老年学领域越来越受到关注，沿着的是面临与医疗保健、财务、临终关怀和住房有关的重要人生决定的老年人的数量。这一领域的研究重点之一是评估可能正在经历痴呆症初期阶段或其健康问题有损害其精神能力危险的人的理解和决策能力。然而，同样重要的是，我们要了解健康老年人的判断和决策过程如何受到与衰老相关的因素的影响。我们社会的变化导致这些人在各种各样的领域面临越来越复杂的选择，对身体和财务福祉以及持续的独立性产生重要影响。此外，随着家庭越来越分散，技术变革速度加快，老年人可能面临在没有充分的社会和知识支持的情况下作出决定的问题。最后，老年人越来越多地成为营销骗局的目标。因此，重要的是要了解老龄化对有效评估信息和做出适应性选择的能力的影响。这项拟议中的研究将通过一系列七项研究系统地研究决策和衰老，其中将对年龄在25岁至85岁之间的人进行测试。研究的具体重点是认知能力，情感，经验和动机之间的相互作用，在确定年龄差异的表现。对判断和决策过程的研究也将帮助我们理解许多老年人在面临能力下降的情况下保持这些领域有效技能的能力的适应过程。公共卫生相关性：有效的决策是一项重要的适应技能，对于老年人在日益复杂的世界中独立运作的能力至关重要。这项研究的结果将帮助我们在晚年最大限度地提高这种能力，通过确定那些因素，使老年人最容易受到判断力差，这反过来又应该帮助我们在结构的决策环境，以尽量减少其影响。反过来，这应该有助于提高晚年的幸福感。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Issues relating to decision-making competence are of increasing interest in the field of gerontology as the average lifespan increases, along with the number of older individuals who are faced with important life decisions having to do with health care, finances, end-of-life care, and housing. One focus of research in this realm is the assessment of the ability to both comprehend and make decisions in people who may be experiencing initial stages of dementia or whose health problems are in danger of impairing their mental abilities. It is also critical, however, that we understand how judgment and decision-making processes in healthy older adults are affected by factors associated with aging. Changes in our society have resulted in these individuals being faced with increasingly complex choices in a wide-variety of domains with important implications for physical and financial well-being, and continued independence. It is also the case that as families become more widely dispersed and the rate of technological change accelerates, older adults may be faced with making decisions without adequate social and knowledge-based supports. Finally, older adults are increasingly and disproportionately targeted for marketing scams. Thus, it is important to understand the impact that aging has on the ability to be effective evaluators of information and to make adaptive choices. The proposed research will systematically examine decision-making and aging through a series of seven studies in which individuals aged from 25 to 85 will be tested. The specific focus of the research is on the interaction between cognitive ability, emotion, experience, and motivation in determining age differences in performance. Research on judgment and decision-making processes will also help us understand the adaptive processes underlying many older adults' ability to maintain effective skills in these domains in the face of normative declines in ability. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Effective decision-making is an important adaptive skill that is essential to older adults' ability to function independently in an increasingly complex world. The results of this research will assist us in maximizing such capabilities in later life by identifying those factors that make older adults most vulnerable to poor judgment, which in turn should assist us in structuring decision contexts to minimize their impact. This, in turn, should serve to boost well-being in later life.