The Bearable Lightness of Aging : Judgment and Decision Processes in Older Adults

The problems and challenges of aging have long been an important societal concern. Accompanying the physical changes of aging are psychological changes that have critical implications for the quality of life that people experience. Equally critical may be the fact that, as people age, their opportunities to recover or compensate for poor-quality judgments and decisions diminish. For example, poor financial decisions early in life may be remedied by learning from mistakes and making better decisions in the future. Less than careful health care choices in one’s earlier years may be compensated for by resilience to disease or injury. However, as one ages, diminished physical capacity and less time can translate into reduced opportunities to recover from the “normal” ups and downs of everyday decision outcomes. As a result, understanding the psychological processes that underlie the judgments and decisions of older adults can help us to identify areas in which they may be most vulnerable and therefore can guide efforts to help them face the challenges of aging.

[1]  I. Ritov,et al.  Decision Affect Theory: Emotional Reactions to the Outcomes of Risky Options , 1997 .

[2]  L. J. Chapman,et al.  Genesis of popular but erroneous psychodiagnostic observations. , 1967, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[3]  Eugene Borgida,et al.  The Differential Impact of Abstract vs. Concrete Information on Decisions , 1977 .

[4]  P. Slovic,et al.  The Role of Affect and Worldviews as Orienting Dispositions in the Perception and Acceptance of Nuclear Power1 , 1996 .

[5]  G. Labouvie-vief,et al.  Speaking about feelings: conceptions of emotion across the life span. , 1989, Psychology and aging.

[6]  A. Tenbrunsel,et al.  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 2013 .

[7]  G. Radvansky.  Aging, Memory, and Comprehension , 1999 .

[8]  O. Mowrer.  Learning theory and the symbolic processes. , 1962 .

[9]  F. Blanchard-Fields,et al.  ALTERNATIVE CONCEPTIONS OF WISDOM: AN ONION‐PEELING EXERCISE , 1987 .

[10]  R. Zajonc.  Feeling and thinking : Preferences need no inferences , 1980 .

[11]  S. Mutter,et al.  Aging and illusory correlation in judgments of co-occurrence. , 1994, Psychology and aging.

[12]  Stephen M. Johnson,et al.  The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits , 2000 .

[13]  G. Labouvie-vief,et al.  Emotions and Self-Regulation: A Life Span View , 1989 .

[14]  B. Fredrickson,et al.  Choosing social partners: how old age and anticipated endings make people more selective. , 1990, Psychology and aging.

[15]  Jonathan Baron,et al.  Behavioral Law and Economics: Reluctance to Vaccinate: Omission Bias and Ambiguity , 1990 .

[16]  R. Thaler.  Toward a positive theory of consumer choice , 1980 .

[17]  P S Appelbaum,et al.  Assessing patients' capacities to consent to treatment. , 1988, The New England journal of medicine.

[18]  T. Salthouse.  The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. , 1996, Psychological review.

[19]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice: Evidence and an Interpretation , 1992 .

[20]  E. Turkheimer,et al.  Modeling psychiatric patients' treatment decision making , 1995 .

[21]  K. R. Hammond.  Human judgment and social policy , 1980 .

[22]  N. Frijda,et al.  Relations among emotion, appraisal, and emotional action readiness , 1989 .

[23]  Eldar Shafir,et al.  Reason-based choice , 1993, Cognition.

[24]  S. Epstein,et al.  Conflict between intuitive and rational processing: when people behave against their better judgment. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[25]  Alan G. Sanfey,et al.  Judgment and decision making across the adult life span: A tutorial review of psychological research. , 2000 .

[26]  J. Birren,et al.  History, concepts, and theory in the psychology of aging , 1996 .

[27]  Elke U. Weber,et al.  And let us not Forget Memory: The Role of Memory Processes and Techniques in the Study of Judgment and Choice , 1995 .

[28]  G. Fricchione.  Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain , 1995 .

[29]  P. Slovic,et al.  Reversals of preference between bids and choices in gambling decisions. , 1971 .

[30]  Timothy D. Wilson,et al.  Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction , 1993 .

[31]  A. Tversky,et al.  On the psychology of prediction , 1973 .

[32]  A. Damasio,et al.  Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex , 1994, Cognition.

[33]  M. Lawton,et al.  Dimensions of affective experience in three age groups. , 1992, Psychology and aging.

[34]  M. C. Smith,et al.  Adult age-group differences in recall for the literal and interpretive meanings of narrative text. , 1997, The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences.

[35]  P. Slovic.  The Construction of Preference , 1995 .

[36]  P. Costa,et al.  Declines in divergent thinking with age: cross-sectional, longitudinal, and cross-sequential analyses. , 1987, Psychology and aging.

[37]  P. Appelbaum,et al.  Comparison of standards for assessing patients' capacities to make treatment decisions. , 1995, The American journal of psychiatry.

[38]  T. R. Stewart,et al.  Aging and multiple cue probability learning: the case of inverse relationships. , 1997, Acta psychologica.

[39]  L L Jacoby,et al.  Automatic versus intentional uses of memory: aging, attention, and control. , 1993, Psychology and aging.

[40]  Alan G. Sanfey,et al.  Does Evidence Presentation Format Affect Judgment? An Experimental Evaluation of Displays of Data for Judgments , 1998 .

[41]  M. M. Johnson,et al.  Age differences in decision making: a process methodology for examining strategic information processing. , 1990, Journal of gerontology.

[42]  Lola L. Lopes,et al.  [Advances in Experimental Social Psychology] Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Volume 20 Volume 20 || Between Hope and Fear: The Psychology of Risk , 1987 .

[43]  A. Tversky,et al.  On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies. , 1982, The New England journal of medicine.

[44]  A. Tversky,et al.  Affect, Generalization, and the Perception of Risk. , 1983 .

[45]  L. Carstensen,et al.  Taking time seriously. A theory of socioemotional selectivity. , 1999, The American psychologist.

[46]  R. Wigton,et al.  The Influence of Treatment Descriptions on Advance Medical Directive Decisions , 1992, Journal of The American Geriatrics Society.

[47]  A. Isen,et al.  Positive affect and decision making. , 1993 .

[48]  S. Streufert,et al.  Age and management team performance. , 1990, Psychology and aging.

[49]  G. Loewenstein.  Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior , 1996 .

[50]  M. Myles-Worsley,et al.  The influence of expertise on X-ray image processing. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[51]  L. Fitten,et al.  Assessing Treatment Decision‐Making Capacity in Elderly Nursing Home Residents , 1990, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

[52]  Paul Slovic,et al.  The Springs of Action: Affective and Analytical Information Processing in Choice , 2000 .

[53]  Paul Slovic,et al.  Response-induced reversals of preference in gambling: An extended replication in las vegas , 1973 .

[54]  A. Tversky,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[55]  A. Tversky,et al.  Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment , 1983 .

[56]  S. Epstein.  Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious. , 1994, The American psychologist.