We examined the effects of both emotional arousal (excitement, anger, neutral) and age (older adults, younger adults) on ratings of advertisement credulity and purchase intention. Inducing both high-arousal positive and high-arousal negative emotions in older adults increased their...

Intertemporal choices are a ubiquitous class of decisions that involve selecting between outcomes available at different times in the future. We investigated the neural systems supporting intertemporal decisions in healthy younger and older adults. Using functional neuroimaging, we find that...

Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) maintains that when futures loom large, as they typically do in youth, people are motivated to explore. When future time is perceived as more limited, as is typical in old age, people are motivated to pursue emotionally meaningful goals. Because the...

The anterior insula has been implicated in both the experience and the anticipation of negative outcomes. Although individual differences in insular sensitivity have been associated with self-report measures of chronic anxiety, previous research has not examined whether individual differences in...

Although global declines in structure have been documented in the aging human brain, little is known about the functional integrity of the striatum and prefrontal cortex in older adults during incentive processing. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine whether...

Contrasting cognitive and physical decline, research in emotional aging suggests that most older adults enjoy high levels of affective well-being and emotional stability into their 70s and 80s. We investigate the contributions of age-related changes in emotional motivation and competence to...