Are older adults meaner to others? Age differences in emotion-related social decision making.

1189 

Abstract Submission 

Hong-Zhou Xu¹, Xue-Rui Peng^1,2, Jing Yu^1,3

¹Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China, ²Chair of Lifespan Developmental Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany, ³Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Hong-Zhou Xu  
Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University
Chongqing, China

Xue-Rui Peng  
Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University|Chair of Lifespan Developmental Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden
Chongqing, China|Dresden, Germany

Jing Yu  
Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University|Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Chongqing, China|Beijing, China

In social interaction, there are often differences in emotional processing between young and older adults, such us the perception of others' sadness (Löckenhoff, Costa Jr et al. 2008, Hayes, McLennan et al. 2020), which may affect emotion-related social decision making in older adults. With aging, brain functions related to social-emotional processing deteriorate in older adults (Dobrushina, Arina et al. 2020, Baez-Lugo, Deza-Araujo et al. 2023), and alterations in the function and structure of the medial prefrontal cortex are likely to influence their value representation in decision making (Samanez-Larkin and Knutson 2015). However, how these neural changes would affect emotion-related social decision making in older adults remains unresolved. Thus, a more comprehensive investigation is warranted to elucidate the nuanced connections between aging, others' emotions, and the neural bases of social decision making.

Thirty-one young adults (aged 18~24 years) and 32 older adults (aged 59~78 years) were recruited to perform a variation of the dictator game task in the fMRI scanner (Figure 1A). In this task, we used neutral and sad emotional fascial pictures to manipulate the emotional characteristics of the recipients and to investigate how others' emotions influence social decision making in young and old individuals from both behavioral and neurological perspectives. After the experiment, participants also completed a questionnaire outside of the scanner and were asked to self-report how much they had allocated. Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to analyze the behavioral data, while representational similarity analysis was used to analyze the fMRI data. Mediation analysis was also used to examine the mediating role of neural representation between age and allocation behavior. Given the significant differences in education between young and older adults, this was controlled for as a covariate in all analyses.

Behavioral results showed that young adults' allocation behavior was regulated by others' emotions, as young adults allocated more money to sad recipients than to neutral recipients, whereas there was no significant difference in older adults' allocation behavior (Figure 1B&1C). Neurally, the similarity scores of the neural representation in the right insula, the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), left caudate and left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were higher in young adults than in older adults, but the similarity scores in the right angular gyrus in older adults was higher than in young adults (Figure 2A). Besides, the neural representation between the right insula and the DMPFC played a significant mediating role between age and allocation behavior (Figure 2B).

In conclusion, the present sturdy indicated that aging weakened the regulatory effect of others' emotions on social decision making from behavioral and neural perspectives. More importantly, the neural representation between the right insula and the left DMPFC played an important mediating role between age and allocation behavior. Considering that the insula and the DMPFC had important roles in processing social emotions and representing value for others, respectively (Rogers-Carter and Christianson 2019, Tomova, Saxe et al. 2020, Gangopadhyay, Chawla et al. 2021). One possible explanation is that the diminished moderating effect of others' emotions on older adults' decision making may be related to their reduced ability to process sadness and further affect their value representation for others, rather than because older adults are more miserly. Therefore, this study provided a potential neural pathway to explain age differences in emotion-related social decision making.

Emotion and Motivation Other

Decision Making ²

Aging ¹

Multivariate Approaches

BOLD fMRI

Aging

Emotions

FUNCTIONAL MRI

Social Interactions

Other - social decision making; representative similarity analysis; mediation analysis