Decision making across the life span

Learning to choose adaptively between different behavioral options in order to reach goals is a pervasive task in life for people of all ages. Individuals are often confronted with complex, uncertain situations that nonetheless require decisive actions that would facilitate the pursuit of short-term or long-term goals. Adaptive decision making as such entails interactions between processes that monitor the choice-outcome relations as well as processes that evaluate these relations with respect to goal relevance. These dynamics implicate close interplays between attention, learning, memory, motivation, and emotion, which are subserved by cortical-subcortical networks and are neurochemically regulated by transmitters, such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin. Across the life span, these functional brain circuits as well as neurotransmitter systems undergo basic biological maturation and senescence as well as plasticity due to the accumulation of experience or changes in motivational goals. Studying decision making across different adult life periods may shed light on how the very processes of decision making adapt to constraints on brain resources due to aging, how these processes benefit from experience, or how decision making is influenced by shifting goals. The aim of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience is to open a forum for the subfield of decision science that focuses on comparing and contrasting decision making in people of different ages

Emotional experience improves with age: Evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling

Recent evidence suggests that emotional well-being improves from early adulthood to old age. This study used experience-sampling to examine the developmental course of emotional experience in a representative sample of adults spanning early to very late adulthood. Participants (N = 184, Wave 1; N = 191, Wave 2; N = 178, Wave 3) reported their emotional states at five randomly selected times each day for a one week period. Using a measurement burst design, the one-week sampling procedure was repeated five and then ten years later. Cross-sectional and growth curve analyses indicate that aging is associated with more positive overall emotional well-being, with greater emotional stability and with more complexity (as evidenced by greater co-occurrence of positive and negative emotions). These findings remained robust after accounting for other variables that may be related to emotional experience (personality, verbal fluency, physical health, and demographic variables). Finally, emotional experience predicted mortality; controlling for age, sex, and ethnicity, individuals who experienced relatively more positive than negative emotions in everyday life were more likely to have survived over a 13 year period. Findings are discussed in the theoretical context of socioemotional selectivity theory

Data sonification for Bachelor of Computer science in US from 1966 to 1999.

Recent years have seen a rejuvenation of interest in studies of motivation-cognition interactions arising from many different areas of psychology and neuroscience. The present issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience provides a sampling of some of the latest research from a number of these different areas. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the current state of the field, in terms of key research developments and candidate neural mechanisms receiving focused investigation as potential sources of motivation-cognition interaction. However, our primary goal is conceptual: to highlight the distinct perspectives taken by different research areas, in terms of how motivation is defined, the relevant dimensions and dissociations that are emphasized, and the theoretical questions being targeted. Together, these distinctions present both challenges and opportunities for efforts aiming toward a more unified and cross-disciplinary approach. We identify a set of pressing research questions calling for this sort of cross-disciplinary approach, with the explicit goal of encouraging integrative and collaborative investigations directed toward them

A Study on Youth Online Impulsive Purchase: The Relationship between Individual Difference, Shopping Environment, Emotion Response and Purchase

10.1177/0973258613512571Journal of Creative Communications82-3209-22