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.

Neural Support for Contributions of Utility and Narrative Processing of Evidence in Juror Decision Making.

Efforts to explain complex human decisions have focused on competing theories emphasizing utility and narrative mechanisms. These are difficult to distinguish using behavior alone. Both narrative and utility theories have been proposed to explain juror decisions, which are among the most consequential complex decisions made in a modern society.

Social cognitive processes explain bias in juror decisions.

Jury decisions are among the most consequential social decisions in which bias plays a notable role. While courts take measures to reduce the influence of non-evidentiary factors, jurors may still incorporate biases into their decisions. One common bias, crime-type bias, is the extent to which the perceived strength of a prosecutor's case depends on the severity of the crime.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Individual differences in dopamine D receptor availability correlate with reward valuation.

Reward valuation, which underlies all value-based decision-making, has been associated with dopamine function in many studies of nonhuman animals, but there is relatively less direct evidence for an association in humans. Here, we measured dopamine D receptor (DRD2) availability in vivo in humans to examine relations between individual differences in dopamine receptor availability and neural activity associated with a measure of reward valuation, expected value (i.e.

Subjective value representations during effort, probability and time discounting across adulthood.

Every day, humans make countless decisions that require the integration of information about potential benefits (i.e. rewards) with other decision features (i.

FTO affects food cravings and interacts with age to influence age-related decline in food cravings.

The fat mass and obesity associated gene (FTO) was the first gene identified by genome-wide association studies to correlate with higher body mass index (BMI) and increased odds of obesity. FTO remains the locus with the largest and most replicated effect on body weight, but the mechanism whereby FTO affects body weight and the development of obesity is not fully understood. Here we tested whether FTO is associated with differences in food cravings and a key aspect of dopamine function that has been hypothesized to influence food reward mechanisms.

Spontaneous Eye Blink Rate (EBR) Is Uncorrelated with Dopamine D2 Receptor Availability and Unmodulated by Dopamine Agonism in Healthy Adults.

Spontaneous eye blink rate (EBR) has been proposed as a noninvasive, inexpensive marker of dopamine functioning. Support for a relation between EBR and dopamine function comes from observations that EBR is altered in populations with dopamine dysfunction and EBR changes under a dopaminergic manipulation. However, the evidence across the literature is inconsistent and incomplete.

Younger and older adults' collaborative recall of shared and unshared emotional pictures.

Although a group of people working together recalls more items than any one individual, they recall fewer unique items than the same number of people working apart whose responses are combined. This is known as collaborative inhibition, and it is a robust effect that occurs for both younger and older adults. However, almost all previous studies documenting collaborative inhibition have used stimuli that were neutral in emotional valence, low in arousal, and studied by all group members.

Reduced effects of age on dopamine D2 receptor levels in physically active adults.

Physical activity has been shown to ameliorate dopaminergic degeneration in non-human animal models. However, the effects of regular physical activity on normal age-related changes in dopamine function in humans are unknown. Here we present cross-sectional data from forty-four healthy human subjects between 23 and 80 years old, showing that typical age-related dopamine D2 receptor loss, assessed with PET [18F]fallypride, was significantly reduced in physically active adults compared to less active adults.

Associations between dopamine D2 receptor availability and BMI depend on age.

Objective: The dopamine D2/3 receptor subtypes (DRD2/3) are the most widely studied neurotransmitter biomarker in research on obesity, but results to date have been inconsistent, have typically involved small samples, and have rarely accounted for subjects' ages despite the large impact of age on DRD2/3 levels. We aimed to clarify the relation between DRD2/3 availability and BMI by examining this association in a large sample of subjects with BMI spanning the continuum from underweight to extremely obese.

Subjects: 130 healthy subjects between 18 and 81years old underwent PET with [18F]fallypride, a high affinity DRD2/3 ligand.