Older adults are disproportionately vulnerable to fraud, and federal agencies have speculated that excessive trust explains their greater vulnerability. Two studies, one behavioral and one using neuroimaging methodology, identified age differences in trust and their neural underpinnings. Older and younger adults rated faces high in trust cues similarly, but older adults perceived faces with cues to untrustworthiness to be significantly more trustworthy and approachable than younger adults. This age-related pattern was mirrored in neural activation to cues of trustworthiness. Whereas younger adults showed greater anterior insula activation to untrustworthy versus trustworthy faces, older adults showed muted activation of the anterior insula to untrustworthy faces. The insula has been shown to support interoceptive awareness that forms the basis of "gut feelings," which represent expected risk and predict risk-avoidant behavior. Thus, a diminished "gut" response to cues of untrustworthiness may partially underlie older adults' vulnerability to fraud. (1) and the Federal Trade Commission (2) have conjectured that older adults' excessive positive responses to other people may underlie their vulnerability. Consistent with this idea, a large body of literature indicates that older adults shape their experiences and social networks in ways that lead to positive socioemotional outcomes (3). As such, older adults' judgments of the trustworthiness of others may also be skewed in a positive direction. Affective judgments of trustworthiness implicate processing in limbic regions, including the amygdala and insula (4, 5). Accordingly, age differences in trust may be reflected in altered patterns of activation in these neural regions.We report the results of two investigations that address how older adults process facial cues indicative of trust differently from younger adults. The first is a behavioral study in which participants rated faces that varied in cues conveying trustworthiness (trustworthy, neutral, untrustworthy) (4). The second study used functional neuroimaging to identify whether facial cues of trustworthiness are processed differently in the brains of older vs. younger adults. We predicted that older adults would perceive people to be more trustworthy and that this pattern would be reflected in lesser insula and/or amygdala responses to the stimuli. Study 1People make many inferences about personal attributes from facial features (6, 7). One fundamental such judgment is whether a person is inherently trustworthy or not (5,8). The present study investigated whether there are reliable age differences in how older and younger adults infer trust from facial cues.Results. Older and younger adults observed faces that had previously been selected to convey cues regarding trustworthiness (trustworthy, neutral, or untrustworthy) (4) and rated them on how trustworthy and approachable the person seemed to be. These ratings were subjected to Age group (younger vs. older) by Face Type (trustworthy, neutral, untrustworthy)...

No abstract

No abstract

Although social support is related to substantial benefits for health and well-being, research has uncovered qualifications to its benefits. In a test of the psychological and biological impact of an audience on responses to laboratory stress challenges, 183 participants going through the Trier Social Stress Test experienced either (a) an unsupportive audience, (b) a supportive audience, or (c) no audience. Both audience conditions produced significantly stronger cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure responses to the stress tasks, relative to the no-audience control, even though the supportive audience was rated as supportive. Contrary to hypotheses offered by several theories, these effects were not moderated by self-esteem, individual differences in psychological resources, or baseline social support. Psychological resources and baseline social support were, however, tied to more beneficial biological and psychological profiles at baseline and at recovery in some cases. It was concluded that when one must perform stressful tasks in front of an audience, evaluative concerns may outweigh the potential benefits of a supportive audience.

Self-regulation is a fundamental human process that refers to multiple complex methods by which individuals pursue goals in the face of distractions. Whereas superior self-regulation predicts better academic achievement, relationship quality, financial and career success, and lifespan health, poor self-regulation increases a person’s risk for negative outcomes in each of these domains and can ultimately presage early mortality. Given its centrality to understanding the human condition, a large body of research has examined cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of self-regulation. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to specific biologic processes that may underlie self-regulation. We address this latter issue in the present review by examining the growing body of research showing that components of the immune system involved in inflammation can alter neural, cognitive, and motivational processes that lead to impaired self-regulation and poor health. Based on these findings, we propose an integrated, multi-level model that describes how inflammation may cause widespread biobehavioral alterations that promote self-regulatory failure. This immunologic model of self-regulatory failure has implications for understanding how biological and behavioral factors interact to influence self-regulation. The model also suggests new ways of reducing disease risk and enhancing human potential by targeting inflammatory processes that affect self-regulation.

It is often assumed that negative affect impairs the executive functions that underlie our ability to control and focus our thoughts. However, support for this claim has been mixed. Recent work has suggested that different negative affective states like anxiety and anger may reflect physiologically separable states with distinct effects on cognition. However, the effects of these two affective states on executive function have never been assessed. As such, we induced anxiety or anger in participants and examined the effects on executive function. We found that anger did not impair executive function relative to a neutral mood, whereas anxiety did. In addition, self-reports of induced anxiety, but not anger, predicted impairments in executive function. These results support functional models of affect and cognition, and highlight the need to consider differences between anxiety and anger when investigating the influence of negative affect on fundamental cognitive processes such as memory and executive function.

Virginia, 1967). Since then, interracial marriage in the United States has been steadily growing-in 2010, 15% of new marriages were between persons of different races (Hayes, 2012). As such, it is not surprising that the number of multiracial individuals in the United States is increasing as well, with the most common multiracial background being Black-White multiracial (U.S. Census, 2010). In fact, multiracials are now one of the fastest growing racial groups in the country, yet social psychologists are only beginning to investigate how this population is perceived and ultimately treated.As multiracial individuals gain visibility in American society, they challenge the utility of perceivers' existing racial categorization system. The average perceiver relies heavily on monoracial categories (e.g., Black, White) in person perception, and use of these categories is highly automatic (Chen & Hamilton, 2012;Cunningham et al., 2004;Willadsen-Jensen & Ito, 2006). Furthermore, monoracial categories are typically thought to be mutually exclusive (Hirschfeld, 1996), such that racial categorization of a novel individual consists of asking the question, "Is he Black or White?" However, multiracial individuals often do not offer a straightforward answer to this question. Therefore, perceivers may find the racial categorization of multiracial individuals to be more difficult than the racial categorizations they are accustomed to making (Chen & Hamilton, 2012;Freeman, Pauker, Apfelbaum, & Ambady, 2010).Perceivers may deal with the ambiguity surrounding the categorization of multiracial individuals in a number of ways, and several different motivations may play an important role in these categorization processes. For instance, perceivers often categorize a multiracial target on the basis of his or her lower status racial group, a categorization pattern called hypodescent that has historical and legal precedence in the United Sates

No abstract