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Aging News & Information
Senior Citizens May Make Best Decisions Relying on
Emotions, Experiences
Medicare, driving, retirement and medical
treatments can be a pain on the brain
 April 26, 2007 - In some decisions, thinking harder
about unfamiliar information will produce the best decisions, but older
adults are likely to fare less well, says Ellen Peters, courtesy
professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and senior research
scientist with Decision Research. But in other situations, she said,
people make better choices when they rely on emotions and past
experiences, and older adults may excel in this condition.
The human brain’s ability to process information
declines with age, but knowledge about the world through experiences
tends to rise over time and influence and older person’s ability to make
sound decisions.
More research is needed to understand how decisions
differ across the lifespan so that better advice can be tailored to
older adults, Peters says.
"We know quite a bit about how the brain processes
information, but we don’t know a whole lot about how that is going to
interact in decisions with experiences and emotional prompts," she said.
Peters is co-author of a paper in which she and
colleagues examine existing literature about the aging brain and
decision making.
Little is known about this important topic at a
time when Americans are looking at a fast-growing elderly population,
she and colleagues write in the quarterly journal Perspectives on
Psychological Science (Volume 2, Issue 1).
By 2050, they note, there will be more people older
than 65 than those younger than 15 for the first time in history.
"Having a high quality of life requires good
decisions, yet we know next to nothing about age differences in decision
making," Peters said.
"For many elderly individuals, the ability to
function independently is a particular concern. By understanding when
the elderly make decisions as well as or better than young adults and
when their decisions are compromised by declining cognitive abilities,
policymakers, family and friends can better target situations in which
assistance is more necessary and other situations where it is not
needed."
The review article looked at basic information
processes and mechanisms that have been studied around the world, using
a dual-process approach. One process involves how people think their way
through information; the other focuses on how they feel their way
through it.
"There were robust differences in these systems,"
Peters said.
"Thinking capacity declines with time. We learn
less easily. We process information more slowly." However, from the
emotional side of processing, "We may show improvements over time. We
may tend to feel our way through decisions more when we are older."
While that improvement may exist, older people who
respond emotionally may be more prone to becoming victims of scam
artists, who often play on emotion, Peters said.
An emerging idea, she added, is that an older
person’s motivation may change from the forward-looking vision of a
young person to one that prioritizes feeling good in the moment.
She noted a just-published study in the journal
Psychology and Aging by Corinna E. Löckenhoff and Laura L. Carstensen of
Stanford University that found that older people focus more on positive
benefits than on negative risks in making health choices.
Understanding the effects of these processes is
vital to improving aging people’s decision-making, Peters said.
"Older people who make mistakes have less time and
less physical resiliency to compensate for bad decisions than do younger
people," she said.
"Older people are more vulnerable. We may not be
able to teach an old dog new tricks, but the old dog may have lots and
lots of old tricks that help quite a bit. In some situations, the old
dogs may be making better decisions than the pups."
Peters began looking at this topic while studying
how the presentation of information impacts medical decisions by older
people, particularly issues involving Medicare and prescription drug
options.
In one study, participants were asked to pick the
lowest co-payment among four insurance policies. A simple chart showed
the plans, monthly premiums and co-payments, but more than 40 percent of
80-84 year olds failed to choose $5 from options ranging from $5 to $15.
With aging people being faced with major decisions
affecting their ability to live independently, including finances and
retirement, medical treatments, when to quit driving and what food to
eat, understanding age differences in how information is processed in
decisions has important theoretical and pragmatic implications, Peters
said.
"Dealing with numbers, for example, is an area in
which older adults require more assistance," she said.
In a separate study, published in the April issue
of the journal Medical Care Research and Review, Peters and another
group of scientists concluded that "less is more" in the presentation of
numbers portraying medical information.
In three studies, 303 employment-aged adults from
18 to 64 years old weighed various amounts and formats of information
about hospital treatments. Simple presentations dramatically helped
people with lower number-processing skills understand more and make
higher quality decisions.
Researchers also found that the use of symbols
sometimes helped people make decisions and other times hindered them.
Editor’s Notes:
 Ellen Peters is a Research Scientist who examines
the affective and analytical processes underlying the decisions that
people make in our increasingly complex world. She studies decision
making as an interaction of characteristics of the decision situation
and characteristics of the individual. In one line of research, Dr.
Peters investigates the conscious and less than conscious processes by
which affect influences choice. In other work, she examines how aging
influences the role of affect in choice. She also teaches courses in
Decision Making and Motivation and Emotion at the University of Oregon.
Home Page
Peters will discuss her findings in an address
("Aging-Related Changes in Affective and Deliberative Processes
Influence Decisions") at 10 a.m. Friday (EDT), May 25, during the 19th
annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, May 24-27,
in Washington, D.C.
Co-authors with Peters on the study in Perspectives
in Psychological Science were Thomas M. Hess of North Carolina State
University, Daniel Västfjäll of Decision Research and Goteborg
University in Sweden and Corinne Auman of Presbyterian College in South
Carolina. The report was supported by the National Science Foundation,
the National Institutes of Health and the NIH National Institute on
Aging.
Co-authors with Peters on the study appearing in
Medical Care Research and Review were: Nathan Dieckmann, a graduate
teaching fellow at the University of Oregon and researcher at Decision
Research; Anna Dixon, lecturer in European Health Policy at the London
School of Economics and former visiting scholar in the UO Institute for
Policy Research and Innovation; Judith H. Hibbard, professor of
planning, public policy & management at the UO; and C.K. Mertz of
Decision Research. The study was funded by the Blue Cross Blue Shield
Association and the National Science Foundation.
Decision Research is a non-profit research
institute founded in 1976 in Eugene to help individuals, industry,
government and society understand and cope with the complex and often
risky decisions of modern life.
The issue of the journal cited in this release is
the March issue, which is currently scheduled for printing on May 4.
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