Date and Time
October 12, 2005
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Joseph A. Mikels - Stanford University

Recent research suggests that while deliberative and effortful cognitive processing declines with age, deliberative and effortful emotional processing is well maintained across the life span. Taking into account the growing body of literature showing that emotional well-being is as good, if not better, in older adults compared with their younger counterparts, this finding adds the suggestion of a possible contributory mechanism. The project to be presented in this Research in Progress seminar explores whether a focus on emotional on-line processing could aid older people in making good choices.

Older and younger adults were presented information about two health care plans (constructed such that one is the better choice) and were instructed to either 1) process the details about the options or 2) process emotional reactions to the options. The amount of information presented about each option increased incrementally. In our preliminary analyses, we found that as the amount of information presented increased, older adults made poorer choices in the condition where they were instructed to process details of the plans. In contrast, we found that they maintained good performance in the condition in which they were instructed to process their emotional reactions.

This project is a seed project for the Center on Advancing Decision Making in Aging (CADMA), a research effort based at CHP/PCOR.