Understanding cognitive mechanisms of emotion regulation in aging

描述(申请人提供)：随着婴儿潮一代进入老年，65岁以上的美国人的数量在接下来的20年里增加了175%，到2030年，老年人将占总人口的20%左右。因此，了解支持他们情绪健康和幸福感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的积极情绪更多，并优先关注和记忆积极的刺激和事件。一点儿没错 然而，老年人表现出这些积极偏见的原因尚不清楚。在可能的原因中，老年人如何调节自己的情绪已被提出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，并有效地使用策略来影响他们所处的环境，他们如何照顾他们，以及他们的情绪如何在公开的行为中表现出来。然而，人们不能--也许也不应该--总是试图避免、修改、忽视或抑制对与健康/死亡相关的应激情况的表达反应，这些情况在老年人中变得频繁。另一种监管选择是使用重新评估，这是一种认知策略，通过改变一个人对事件的解释，改变一个人对事件的情感反应。重新评估是维持心理、身体和社会健康的最有效和最有益的监管策略之一。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。在为数不多的几项关注衰老过程中的重新评估的研究中，一些研究认为是损害，另一些则不是。在这里，我们使用功能磁共振成像来系统地检查老年人是否、何时以及为什么在重新评估方面有效。因此，这项建议直接响应了FOA PAR-11-337‘S提出的申请，从行为、心理和神经生物学层面审查与衰老相关的社会、情感和认知行为。在支持年轻人有效重新评估的神经系统模型的指导下，我们将测试关于重新评估能力在衰老过程中可能受损或完好无损的背景的假设。我们假设，老年人能够有效地重新评估的程度取决于两种因素，每种因素都是我们特定目标的重点。在目标1下，我们将进行两个实验，考察老年人重新评估的能力在多大程度上取决于所部署的重新评估战略/战术中涉及的特定认知过程。在目标2下，我们将再进行两个实验，询问老年人重新评估的能力如何取决于他们减少或增加情绪的目标，以及他们的长期调控目标是否会导致他们有效地自行启动调控。加在一起，这些 研究可能对了解老年人的正常和异常情绪健康具有重要意义，并促进制定干预措施，提高老年人的幸福感和应对与老年人身体和认知能力下降相关的压力的能力。 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.