An examination of younger and older adults' age preferences.

Research suggests that how people feel about aging can contribute to their later physical, cognitive, and mental health. In two studies, we examined younger (ages 18-30) and older adults' (ages 61-70) views about aging by asking them to rate the extent to which they would find it desirable to be various ages between 0 and 120. Participants also indicated both their ideal age (the age at which they would most like to be) and their subjective age (how old they generally feel).

Imagining emotional future events in PTSD: clinical and neurocognitive correlates.

Emotional future thinking serves important functions related to goal pursuit and emotion regulation but has been scantly studied in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The current study sought to characterize emotional future thinking in PTSD and to identify clinical and neurocognitive profiles associated with potential alterations in the level of detail in narratives of imagined future events. Fifty-eight, trauma-exposed, war-zone veterans, who were classified into current PTSD, past PTSD, and no-PTSD groups, were asked to vividly imagine future events in response to positive and negative cue words occurring in the near and distant future.

Episodic processes in moral decisions: Evidence from medial temporal lobe amnesia.

Theoretical accounts of moral decision making imply distinct ways in which episodic memory processes may contribute to judgments about moral dilemmas that entail high conflict between a harmful action and a greater good resulting from such action. Yet, studies examining the status of moral judgment in amnesic patients with medial temporal lobe (MTL) lesions have yielded inconsistent results. To examine whether and how episodic processes contribute to high conflict moral decisions, amnesic patients with MTL damage and control participants were asked to judge the moral acceptability of a harmful action across two conditions that differed in the framing of the moral question.

Probabilistic value learning in medial temporal lobe amnesia.

A prevailing view in cognitive neuroscience suggests that different forms of learning are mediated by dissociable memory systems, with a mesolimbic (i.e., midbrain and basal ganglia) system supporting incremental trial-and-error reinforcement learning and a hippocampal-based system supporting episodic memory.

The Human Medial Temporal Lobe Is Necessary for Remembering Durations within a Sequence of Events but Not Durations of Individual Events.

Recent interest in the role of the hippocampus in temporal aspects of cognition has been fueled, in part, by the observation of "time" cells in the rodent hippocampus-that is, cells that have differential firing patterns depending on how long ago an event occurred. Such cells are thought to provide an internal representation of elapsed time. Yet, the hippocampus is not needed for processing temporal duration information per se, at least on the order of seconds, as evidenced by intact duration judgments in rodents and humans with hippocampal damage.