Age and intranasal oxytocin effects on trust-related decisions after breach of trust: Behavioral and brain evidence.

Abstract

Age-related differences in cognition and socioemotional functions, and in associated brain regions, may reduce sensitivity to cues of untrustworthiness, with effects on trust-related decision making and trusting behavior. This study examined age-group differences in brain activity and behavior during a trust game. In this game, participants received "breach-of-trust" feedback after half of the trials. The feedback indicated that only 50% of the monetary investment into their fellow players had resulted in returns. The study also explored the effects of intranasal oxytocin on trust-related decisions in aging, based on suggestions of a modulatory role of oxytocin in response to negative social stimuli and perceptions of trust. Forty-seven younger and 46 older participants selfadministered intranasal oxytocin or placebo, in a randomized, double-blind, between-subjects procedure, before they engaged in the trust game while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Younger participants invested less into their game partners after breach-of-trust feedback, while older participants showed no significant difference in their investment after breach-of-trust feedback. Oxytocin did not modulate the behavioral effects. However, after breachof-trust feedback, older participants in the oxytocin group showed less activity in the left superior temporal gyrus. In contrast, older participants in the placebo group showed more activity in left superior temporal gyrus after breach of trust. The findings may reflect reduced responsiveness to cues of untrustworthiness in older adults. Furthermore, the modulatory effect of oxytocin on left superior temporal gyrus activity among older adults supports the neuropeptide's age-differential role in neural processes in aging, including in the context of trust-related decision making.

Aging and Financial Exploitation Risk

“…They also show reduced flexibility in adjusting financial investment portfolios following a breach of trust by a partner in an investment game. In contrast, younger adults adapted their decision-making style and reduced investments following untrustworthy actions by game partners (46). Similar age differences in learning the trustworthiness of financial brokers has also been reported (53).…”

“…The second pathway originates from reduced social capacity (specified in our model as social appraisal and perception) in older adulthood. As reviewed earlier, older adults show reduced ability to appraise and detect potentially deceptive information (31,46,58). They also demonstrate alterations in social perception abilities necessary to make appropriate trustworthiness judgments (55,56,64), and display increased attention to more positively-valenced information (48).…”

“…Older adults also demonstrate less reactivity to negative emotional stimuli (see 43, for a review), including explicitly deceptive cues such as lies (44,45) or breach of financial trust (46). Reduced arousal to negative emotional cues has been associated with lower activation of a brain region involved in bodily sensation (47).…”

“…As we described earlier, access to a larger repertoire of prior knowledge has been shown to mitigate impulsive decision-making and reduce temporal discounting during financial decision-making tasks (36). However, these changes may also compound deficits in more cognitively demanding contexts: older-adult decision-making is particularly impaired on tasks that require rule-learning or shifting contingencies, or involve more abstract or context-dependent reasoning (see 24), as well as the detection of negatively-valenced deceptive cues (44,46,58), particularly when cognitive demands are high (60).…”

Age-Related Differences in Ventral Striatal and Default Mode Network Function During Reciprocated Trust

“…Future work may implement alternative two-stage designs (Daw et al, 2011) in which older adults have the option to choose to interact on a given trial with a close or unknown other before deciding how much to invest. We also note that other work has reported inconsistencies in age-related differences in trust decisions, and it appears that experimental context may be an important moderator of these effects (Bailey et al, 2015;Frazier et al, 2021). In addition, the effects of social closeness on behavior could be influenced by other aspects of the relationships that we did not assess, including social network size (Kwak et al, 2018) and relationship quality (Santini et al, 2015).…”