Preserved memory for decisions across adulthood.

Remembering our decisions is crucial - it allows us to learn from past mistakes and construct future behavior. However, it is unclear if age-related memory declines impact the memorability of older adults' decisions. Here, we compared younger and older adults' ability to remember their decisions.

Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.

Communicating information about health risks empowers individuals to make informed decisions. To identify effective communication strategies, we manipulated the specificity, self-relevance, and emotional framing of messages designed to motivate information seeking about COVID-19 exposure risk. In Study 1 (N=221,829), we conducted a large-scale social media field study.

Adult age-related differences in susceptibility to social conformity pressures in self-control over daily desires.

Developmental literature suggests that susceptibility to social conformity pressure peaks in adolescence and disappears with maturity into early adulthood. Predictions about these behaviors are less clear for middle-aged and older adults. On the one hand, while age-related increases in prioritization of socioemotional goals might predict greater susceptibility to social conformity pressures, aging is also associated with enhanced emotion regulation that could support resistance to conformity pressures.

Communicating COVID-19 exposure risk with an interactive website counteracts risk misestimation.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals depended on risk information to make decisions about everyday behaviors and public policy. Here, we assessed whether an interactive website influenced individuals' risk tolerance to support public health goals. We collected data from 11,169 unique users who engaged with the online COVID-19 Event Risk Tool (https://covid19risk.

Adult Age Differences in Evoked Emotional Responses to Dynamic Facial Expressions.

Objectives: Facial expressions are powerful social signals that motivate feelings and actions in the observer. Research on face processing has overwhelmingly used static facial images, which have limited ecological validity. Previous research on the age-related positivity effect and age differences in social motivation suggest that older adults might experience different evoked emotional responses to facial expressions than younger adults.

Multivariate associations between dopamine receptor availability and risky investment decision-making across adulthood.

Enhancing dopamine increases financial risk taking across adulthood but it is unclear whether baseline individual differences in dopamine function are related to risky financial decisions. Here, thirty-five healthy adults completed an incentive-compatible risky investment decision task and a PET scan at rest using [11C]FLB457 to assess dopamine D2-like receptor availability. Participants made choices between a safe asset (bond) and a risky asset (stock) with either an expected value less than the bond ("bad stock") or expected value greater than the bond ("good stock").

Heuristic decision-making across adulthood.

In general, research on aging and decision-making has grown in recent years. Yet, little work has investigated how reliance on classic heuristics may differ across adulthood. For example, younger adults rely on the availability of information from memory when judging the relative frequency of plane crashes versus car accidents, but it is unclear if older adults are similarly reliant on this heuristic.

Reasons for Receiving or Not Receiving Bivalent COVID-19 Booster Vaccinations Among Adults - United States, November 1-December 10, 2022.

Bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccines, developed to protect against both ancestral and Omicron BA.4/BA.5 variants, are recommended to increase protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe disease* (1,2).

Imagining a Personalized Scenario Selectively Increases Perceived Risk of Viral Transmission for Older Adults.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public-health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to COVID-19; as of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths in the U.S.

Temporal discounting across adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

A number of developmental theories have been proposed that make differential predictions about the links between age and temporal discounting, or the devaluation of future rewards. Most empirical studies examining adult age differences in temporal discounting have relied on economic intertemporal choice tasks, which pit choosing a smaller, sooner monetary reward against choosing a larger, later one. Although initial studies using these tasks suggested older adults discount less than younger adults, follow-up studies provided heterogeneous, and thus inconclusive, results.

Decision Making across Adulthood during Physical Distancing.

Covid-19-related social-distancing measures have dramatically limited physical social contact between individuals and increased monetary and health concerns for individuals of all ages. We wondered how these new societal conditions would impact the choices individuals make about monetary, health, and social rewards, and if these unprecedented conditions would have a differential impact on older individuals. We conducted two online studies to examine temporal discounting of monetary, health, and social rewards; stated preferences for monetary, health, and social rewards; and physical distancing behaviors.

Pairing facts with imagined consequences improves pandemic-related risk perception.

The COVID-19 pandemic reached staggering new peaks during a global resurgence more than a year after the crisis began. Although public health guidelines initially helped to slow the spread of disease, widespread pandemic fatigue and prolonged harm to financial stability and mental well-being contributed to this resurgence. In the late stage of the pandemic, it became clear that new interventions were needed to support long-term behavior change.

Dopaminergic modulation of reward discounting in healthy rats: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Rationale: Although numerous studies have suggested that pharmacological alteration of the dopamine (DA) system modulates reward discounting, these studies have produced inconsistent findings.

Objectives: Here, we conducted a systematic review and pre-registered meta-analysis to evaluate DA drug-mediated effects on reward discounting of time, probability, and effort costs in studies of healthy rats. This produced a total of 1343 articles to screen for inclusion/exclusion.

Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams.

Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exemplified by the fact that no two teams chose identical workflows to analyse the data.

Advances in Emotion-Regulation Choice from Experience Sampling.

Recent experience-sampling studies by Blanke et al. and Grommisch et al. provide insights into how individuals regulate their emotions in daily life.

Emotion dynamics across adulthood in everyday life: Older adults are more emotionally stable and better at regulating desires.

Older adults report experiencing improved emotional health, such as more intense positive affect and less intense negative affect. However, there are mixed findings on whether older adults are better at regulating emotion-a hallmark feature of emotional health-and most research is based on laboratory studies that may not capture how people regulate their emotions in everyday life. We used experience sampling to examine how multiple measures of emotional health, including mean affect, dynamic fluctuations between affective states and the ability to resist desires-a common form of emotion regulation-differ in daily life across adulthood.

Mesolimbic dopamine D2 receptors and neural representations of subjective value.

The process by which the value of delayed rewards is discounted varies from person to person. It has been suggested that these individual differences in subjective valuation of delayed rewards are supported by mesolimbic dopamine D2-like receptors (D2Rs) in the ventral striatum. However, no study to date has documented an association between direct measures of dopamine receptors and neural representations of subjective value in humans.

Exercise, Dopamine, and Cognition in Older Age.

Jonasson et al. investigated whether individual differences in human dopamine receptors (D2R) were related to cognitive performance before and after a 6-month aerobic exercise intervention (compared with active control). While D2R decreased (perhaps counterintuitively) with exercise, there was no relationship between D2R and working memory at baseline or following exercise.

Reproducibility of the correlative triad among aging, dopamine receptor availability, and cognition.

The evidence that dopamine function mediates the association between aging and cognition is one of the most cited findings in the cognitive neuroscience of aging. However, few and relatively small studies have directly examined these associations. Here we examined correlations among adult age, dopamine D2-like receptor (D2R) availability, and cognition in two cross-sectional studies of healthy human adults.

Age Differences in Intertemporal Choice: The Role of Task Type, Outcome Characteristics, and Covariates.

Objectives: Prior research has revealed age differences in the preferred timing of monetary outcomes, but results are inconsistent across studies. The present study examined the role of task type, outcome characteristics, and a range of theoretically implicated covariates that may contribute to variations in age effects.

Method: Two types of intertemporal choice paradigms (temporal discounting and sequence construction) were administered to a diverse life-span sample (n = 287, aged 18-87).

Reduced serotonin receptors and transporters in normal aging adults: a meta-analysis of PET and SPECT imaging studies.

Alterations in serotonin (5-HT) function have been hypothesized to underlie a range of physiological, emotional, and cognitive changes in older age. Here, we conducted a quantitative synthesis and comparison of the effects of age on 5-HT receptors and transporters from cross-sectional positron emission tomography and single-photon emission computed tomography imaging studies. Random-effects meta-analyses of 31 studies including 1087 healthy adults yielded large negative effects of age in 5-HT-2A receptors (largest in global cortex), moderate negative effects of age in 5-HT transporters (largest in thalamus), and small negative effects of age in 5-HT-1A receptors (largest in parietal cortex).

Differential regional decline in dopamine receptor availability across adulthood: Linear and nonlinear effects of age.

Theories of adult brain development, based on neuropsychological test results and structural neuroimaging, suggest differential rates of age-related change in function across cortical and subcortical sub-regions. However, it remains unclear if these trends also extend to the aging dopamine system. Here we examined cross-sectional adult age differences in estimates of D2-like receptor binding potential across several cortical and subcortical brain regions using PET imaging and the radiotracer [ F]Fallypride in two samples of healthy human adults (combined N = 132).

Ventral striatal dopamine transporter availability is associated with lower trait motor impulsivity in healthy adults.

Impulsivity is a transdiagnostic feature of a range of externalizing psychiatric disorders. Preclinical work links reduced ventral striatal dopamine transporter (DAT) availability with heightened impulsivity and novelty seeking. However, there is a lack of human data investigating the relationship between DAT availability, particularly in subregions of the striatum, and the personality traits of impulsivity and novelty seeking.

Individual Differences in Dopamine Are Associated with Reward Discounting in Clinical Groups But Not in Healthy Adults.

Some people are more willing to make immediate, risky, or costly reward-focused choices than others, which has been hypothesized to be associated with individual differences in dopamine (DA) function. In two studies using PET imaging, one empirical (Study 1: = 144 males and females across 3 samples) and one meta-analytic (Study 2: = 307 across 12 samples), we sought to characterize associations between individual differences in DA and time, probability, and physical effort discounting in human adults. Study 1 demonstrated that individual differences in DA D2-like receptors were not associated with time or probability discounting of monetary rewards in healthy humans, and associations with physical effort discounting were inconsistent across adults of different ages.

Lack of consistent sex differences in D-amphetamine-induced dopamine release measured with [F]fallypride PET.

Rationale: Sex differences in the dopaminergic response to psychostimulants could have implications for drug abuse risk and other psychopathology involving the dopamine system, but human data are limited and mixed.

Objectives: Here, we sought to investigate sex differences in dopamine release after oral D-amphetamine administration.

Methods: We used [F]fallypride positron emission tomography (PET) to measure the change in dopamine D2/3 receptor availability (%ΔBP, an index of dopamine release) between placebo and D-amphetamine sessions in two independent datasets containing a total of 39 females (on either hormonal birth control n = 18, postmenopausal n = 10, or studied in the first 10 days of their menstrual cycle n = 11) and 37 males.