Social Cognition and Aging

描述(由申请人提供)：随着老年人平均寿命的增加，以及面临与医疗保健、财务、临终关怀和住房有关的重要人生决定的老年人数量的增加，与决策能力有关的问题在老年学领域引起越来越大的兴趣。这一领域的研究重点之一是评估那些可能正在经历痴呆症初期阶段或其健康问题有可能损害其智力能力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是如何受到与衰老相关的因素的影响的。我们社会的变化导致这些人在各种各样的领域面临着越来越复杂的选择，这些领域对身体和经济福祉以及继续独立具有重要影响。情况也是如此，随着家庭变得更加分散，技术变革的速度加快，老年人可能面临在没有足够的社会和基于知识的支持的情况下做出决定。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。这项拟议的研究将通过一系列七项研究，对年龄在25岁到85岁之间的人进行测试，系统地研究决策和衰老。这项研究的重点是认知能力、情绪、经验和动机之间的交互作用，以决定年龄差异的表现。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对能力正常下降时保持这些领域有效技能的能力背后的适应过程。

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.