No abstract

Older adults process emotional information differently than younger adults and may demonstrate less of a negativity bias on cognitive tasks. The Iowa Gambling Task designed by A. Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio (1997) has been used to examine the integration of emotion and cognition in a risky-choice decision task and may give insight into differences in the decision-making strategies in younger and older adults. Eighty-eight younger adults (18-34 years) and 67 older adults (65-88 years) completed the Iowa Gambling Task. Using a theoretical decomposition of the task designed by J. R. Busemeyer and J. C. Stout (2002), the authors found that both groups were successful at solving the task but used very different strategies that reflected each group's strength. For younger adults, that strength was learning and memory. For older adults, that strength was an accurate representation of wins and losses (valence).

We discuss possible underlying causes of the domain-specific nature of risk taking and age.

Studies of younger adults have found that negative information has a stronger influence than positive information across a wide range of domains. T. A. Ito, J. T. Larsen, N. K. Smith, and J. T. Cacioppo (1998) reported that during evaluative categorization, extreme negative images produced greater brain activity than did equally extreme positive images in younger adults. Older adults have been reported to optimize affect and attend less to negative information. In this article, the negativity bias was examined in 20 older versus 20 younger adults during evaluative categorization, with a focus on brain activity occurring roughly 500 ms after presentation of visual stimuli. Results demonstrated a significant decrease in brain activity to both positive and negative stimuli (p < .05) and an elimination of the negativity bias in older adults.

The authors examined the relationship between apathy, depression, and cognitive performance in 48 HIV-1-seropositive and 21 seronegative (control) subjects, using reaction time (RT) and working memory tasks. Apathy, but not depression, was associated with working memory deficits among HIV-seropositive subjects. The cognitive-affective component of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), but not apathy, was associated with slowing and decreased accuracy on a choice RT task. The BDI cognitive-affective component was more closely associated than the BDI somatic component with both RT slowing and apathy. Results suggest that prominent symptoms of apathy, independent of depression, may be an important indicator of CNS involvement in HIV infection. Total BDI scores showed a less consistent relationship with neurocognitive performance, suggesting that somatic symptomatology is diagnostically ambiguous among HIV-infected subjects.