Article 6: Cognitive Aging in a Social and Affective Context: Advances Over the Past 50 Years (Kensinger, Gutchess)

Question 1

• Successful ageing also social component
• Life satisfaction, lonelinessinfluence on age-related cognititve decline
Applying Theories of Cognitive Aging to Social and Affective Domains
• 3 categories of theories of cognitive ageing:
-focus on availability of resources
-focus on compensatory strategies
-focus on domain-specific areas of loss

Resource Models
• Theory: socioaffective losses with age stem from declines in cognitive resources
• Losses processing efficiency, attention , executive function, and inhibition
• Equal emotion regulation of young, although predicted by fluid intelligence
• encoding of arousing or self-relevant information may be prioritized

Compensation Model
• old recruit additional resources
• hemispheric asymmetry reduction (Harold)
• CRUNCH
 Recruit additional neural regions at lower level than young
• Posterior-anterior shift with ageing (PASA)
increased frontal lobe activity, decreased occipital lobe activity
• Scaffolding Theory of Aging and Cognition (STAC) interplay between processes that can be recruited to bolster cognitive performance and limitations to the availability of resources as through disease, injury, or individual differences as a result of nature or nurture
• Differences in emotion regulation, encoding info relative to oneselfdifferent strategeies

Domain-specific Versus Domain-general Processes
• Change across different regions o brain
• Largest atrophy: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, Hippocampusselective attention and memory binding
• Least affected: ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala socioaffective function, likely explain the age-related preservation of some aspects of affective decision making and learning but still used different than young

Summary
• Many models can be applied to socioaffective ageing
• many ways in which cognitive changes with age impinge upon social and affective abilities

How Socioaffective Function Can Be Intertwined With Cognitive Function
• Wisdom: cognitive, emotional and social
• Influence one another, become intertwined

How Might Socioaffective Factors Influence Cognitive Ability?
• older adults often benefit from emotional framing of information and perform better on tasks that ask them to remember socioaffective context rather than factual content
• more likely to sustain attention on emotional relative to neutral information and to remember that information, particularly if it is of positive valence
• emotional content can be distracting and can impede ongoing task performance
• Larger social networks tend to be associated with better cognitive function and to a lessened likelihood of developing dementia
• discussing information with others can boost memory accuracy
• ocial interaction can mitigate some of the learning and memory deficits of older adults
• likely than young adults to provide the information needed to co-ordinate a shared representation with another individualharder to benefit from socioaffective skills
• stereotype threat disrupts controlled processes implemented during retrieval such that older adults are more impaired at distinguishing true from false memories if they are reminded of memory decline with aging just before they retrieve information, induces a prevention focus in older adults
• socioaffective influences can impair old cognitive function, occurs if the information depletes older adults’ processing resources
How Might Cognitive Changes With Aging Influence Emotion or Social Processing?
• Emotional complexity is reduced with age, which is thought to reflect reduced cognitive capacity—particularly fluid intelligence—after late midlife
• experience of mixed emotions, such as feeling happy with a tinge of sadness, increases slightly with age
• ToM impaired but the affective component seems to be distinct and is more preserved with age
• Different face recognition
• older adults do not rate the most untrustworthy faces as negatively as do younger adults and this alteration in ratings is most pronounced for the older adults with lower levels of cognitive ability
• older adults exhibit advantages over younger adults in differentiating smile types in dynamic faces, in contrast to static faces
Social and Affective Processing Provide Contextual Support
• old influenced by context more than young socioaffective processing can help
• framing information in terms of interpersonal and affective contexts can equate younger and older adults’ performance, emotional reactions can increase the perceived vividness and confidence in older adults’ memories and working collaboratively with a long-term intimate partner improves older adults’ memories in some contexts that would typically be associated with collaborative memory inhibition
• connecting with information in a socially or emotionally relevant manner can provide scaffolds to improve older adults’ memories, such as when information is made personally relevant, be it through imagining interacting with another individual or remembering positive impressions of others who are similar to oneself
Summary:
• socioaffective function sometimes beneficial, sometimes distracting, sometimes linked to cognitive ability

Conclusions and Emerging Themes
• mixture of decline, preservation, and gains in abilities with age
• appreciation of potential strategy differences (e.g., prioritizing positive information, adopting different emotion regulation strategies) with age
• The potential for social and affective information to improve cognitive performance has been demonstrated, however the role of resources, mechanisms for compensation, and domain generality versus specificity have not been sufficiently probed through the use of an individual differences approach or manipulation of available resources
• Context may be so important, in part, because of older adults’ reliance on environmental support

Future Directions
•	multimodal approaches
•	genes and epigenetics,
•	pharmacology
•	neural stimulation
•	etc

Answer 1

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