JoNell Strough, PhD - US grants

The proposed project seeks to understand healthy aging processes through an investigation of cognition in context. In accord with the mission statement of the Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) program of the NIA, the long-term objective of the proposed research is to identify how social contexts shape cognitive development. Of specific interest is how individuals draw from their own abilities and interpersonal relationships to solve problems of daily life and age successfully. The objective of this project, which is one step toward understanding how social contexts shape cognition, is to compare the consequences of working alone versus collaborating with a familiar social partner for younger and older adults' solutions to interpersonal and instrumental everyday problems. Thus, the project addresses cognition in the context of social relationships in daily life. Specifically, the aims of the proposed research are to: (a) compare the performance of younger and older adults who interact with a partner or work alone to solve instrumental and interpersonal everyday problems, and (b) determine how interpersonal, cognitive, and motivational processes that occur during collaborative interactions facilitate or hinder problem-solving performance in early and later adulthood. The central hypothesis of the research is that younger and older adults' problem-solving performance (as indexed by the quality and quantity of their strategies for solving ill-defined instrumental and interpersonal problems) will vary systematically as a function of working with a partner versus working alone, the instrumental or interpersonal domain of the problem, partners' cognitive abilities and motivation for working together, and the perceived quality of face-to-face social interaction. This central hypothesis is tested systematically and comprehensively in order to provide concrete knowledge of the gains and losses that may accrue when younger and older adults collaborate with others to solve everyday problems. Without this knowledge, associations between social relationships and cognitive performance in later life will remain underdeveloped. By providing this knowledge, the proposed research will facilitate the development of empirically-supported interventions to improve individuals' skills for solving everyday problems and make significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the research literature.

Across the life span, people face significant financial, social, and health-related decisions that entail weighing the pros and cons associated with each decision choice. However, little is known about decision making in people 64 years and older, even though aging Baby Boomers are a growing segment of the US population. Recent research indicates that decision making differs by age, but the reasons why are not well understood. To better understand age differences in decision making, this proposal takes a new approach by focusing on how people think about positive and negative information. Specifically, older adults may focus more on positive information than negative information, whereas younger adults may focus more on negative information than positive information. When decisions have both pros and cons, differences between people in how they weigh positive and negative information could determine, at least in part, the decisions they make and explain age-related differences in risky decision-making. By understanding if older and younger people weigh negative and positive information differently and establishing that these differential sensitivities affect decision making, more effective ways of communicating positive and negative information can be developed to encourage good decision making across the life span.

The specific aims of the proposed research are to investigate differences in how older and younger people think about positive versus negative information, and then link these differences to risky decisions. Across two studies, older and younger adults will complete a computer task that assesses basic ways of thinking about positive versus negative information. Participants will also answer questions and complete tasks that measure their decision making. Older and younger adults will be compared to determine if they differ in learning or weighting of positive versus negative information, and the extent to which these differences explain age-related differences in decision making will be tested. The results will show how age-related differences in decisions that involve pros and cons may be due to basic differences in how older and younger people view positive and negative information. Understanding this will provide information that can be used to help people of all ages make good decisions.