The Role of Affect in Decisions Involving Risk across the Adult Life Span

Though traditionally considered a cognitive endeavor, recent theory and research highlight the role of emotion in decision making. In particular, it has become increasingly clear that various aspects of affect are central to decisions involving risk. Because human aging is known to bring substantial change in emotion and cognition, the dynamics of decision making change as we grow older. For instance, older adults are more emotion-focused and are biased toward positive versus negative information relative to younger adults. Age induced changes in the way people make choices are particularly consequential for decisions involving risk in financial and health domains. These age-related changes have major societal implications given that the proportion of older adults in Western societies is approaching unprecedented levels. As greater numbers of older adults are charged with making crucial financial and health decisions, understanding how older individuals make such decisions becomes increasingly critical. How might age-related changes in affect lead to more or less risk taking? How do such age-related changes impact different financial and health-related judgments and decisions? The objective of this research is to address these questions and reconcile currently inconsistent findings regarding aging and risk taking by examining different affective influences across financial and health-related risky decisions. In a series of studies this research will examine how positive and negative affect, both integral to and incidental to the decision being made, influence attitudes toward risk. Physiological measures of integral and incidental affect will be collected to examine the mechanistic paths through which affect influences risk taking across a range of tasks from an experience-dependent financial investment task and multiple descriptive financial and medical framing tasks that manipulate the presence of loss. The differential and combined effects of integral and incidental affect as well as arousal on decision making across age groups will be contrasted with cognitive changes across all studies. The findings obtained will facilitate the development of interventions and risk communication strategies, as well as new policies aimed at assisting older adults as they make consequential decisions. Ultimately, this project will make strides toward better understanding the affective underpinnings of risky decision making across the adult life span.