Adult age-related differences in appetitive and aversive associative learning

Adult age differences in value-based decision making

A better understanding of age-related differences in judgment and decision making is important from both theoretical and applied perspectives. In this review, we focus on value-based decisions across adulthood and specifically on how loss aversion (a relatively stronger weight of losses than gains on decisions) and the relative motivational impact of gains and losses may change with aging. In doing so, we will also cover recent findings about the effects of gain or loss incentives on performance in cognitive tasks that involve attention, learning, and remembering. We point out open questions and critical moderating variables for future theorizing and research.

Loss of Social Status and Subjective Well-Being Across the Adult Life Span: Feeling Stuck or Moving Up?

Previous research suggests that loss of social status adversely impacts subjective well-being. Here, we show that important factors modulating this relationship are age differences in beliefs in opportunities and upward mobility. Across two preregistered longitudinal analyses ( N1 = 5,487 and N2 = 1,092; 18–89 years), we found that individuals who hold a stronger belief that they have more opportunities in the future to improve their social status are less likely to suffer from status loss. Further analyses revealed that this interaction effect can be explained by age differences in these beliefs. Specifically, younger individuals were more likely to hold opportunity and upward mobility beliefs and, thus, were better able to maintain their relative level of life satisfaction when experiencing status loss. Overall, these findings contribute to our understanding of how individuals may mitigate the detrimental consequences of status loss to their subjective well-being across the adult life span.

Adult age differences in remembering gain- and loss-related intentions

Motivational and emotional changes across adulthood have a profound impact on cognition. In this registered report, we conducted an experimental investigation of motivational influence on remembering intentions after a delay (prospective memory; PM) in younger, middle-aged, and older adults, using gain- and loss-framing manipulations. The present study examined for the first time whether motivational framing in a PM task has different effects on younger and older adults' PM performance (N = 180; age range: 18-85 years) in a controlled laboratory setting. Based on lifespan theories of motivation, we assumed that the prevention of losses becomes more relevant with increasing age: We expected that older adults show relatively higher PM performance in a task with loss-related consequences following PM failure than in a task in which successful PM leads to gains. The opposite pattern of performance was expected for younger adults. The findings suggest that the relevance of reward and positive gain-related consequences for successful remembering appears to decrease with age. As hypothesised, a motivational framing × age interaction indicated that age differences in memory performance were smaller with loss-related than gain-related consequences, supporting a loss-prevention view on motivated cognition.