Getting Over Past Mistakes: Prospective and Retrospective Regret in Older Adults.

OBJECTIVE: A considerable number of older people who hold powerful positions in governments and corporate are actively engaged in making decisions that have a far-reaching impact on the community. Some of them have to make decisions on behalf of others, and sometimes, the outcomes of their decisions for others are unfavorable. We experience retrospective regret when the obtained outcome turns out to be less attractive than the counterfactual one. We also actively make choices to avoid regretful outcomes if we prospectively anticipate the regret. In the current study, we investigated how older adults experience regret and how they make choices to avoid potential regret, in the context of making decisions for themselves and on behalf of others. METHOD: Sixty younger and 60 older participants performed a gambling task in which two types of regret were independently measured: prospective (planning to avoid regret during decision making) and retrospective (feeling of regret following the comparison of alternative outcomes). RESULTS: Our results showed that compared to younger adults, the older adults were less sensitive to regret-inducing outcomes, whereas they demonstrated comparable ability in using prospective regret to guide decisions, regardless of whether they made decisions for themselves or on behalf of others. DISCUSSION: Our findings indicate that although older adults experience blunted regret, their ability to avoid future regret to guide subsequent choices remains unimpaired. Our research has implications for understanding how older adults cope with regret.

Older Adults Show Diminished Sensitivity to Potential Losses in Social Bargaining.

OBJECTIVES: Leaders in many organizations are older adults who routinely make decisions in social bargaining situations. However, we know little about the age-related differences in strategic decision making. METHODS: In the current study (n = 182), using a modified Prisoner's Dilemma game (PDG), we examined two important intrinsic motivations for non-cooperation: fear of betrayal and greedy desire to exploit other people among young and older Chinese Singaporeans. RESULTS: Results showed that compared with young adults, older adults demonstrated an intact greed motive but a diminished fear motive in the PDG. DISCUSSION: Our findings suggest a diminished sensitivity to social threat or potential losses due to betrayal in older adults' social decision making. Older adults may have a declined ability to assess social threats even though they retain the motivation to gain an exploitive advantage.

Choosing for you: Diminished self-other discrepancies in financial decisions under risk in the elderly.

Many older adults hold powerful positions in governments and corporate boards throughout the world. Accordingly, older adults often have to make important financial decisions on behalf of others under risk. Although it is common to observe younger adults taking more risks when making financial decisions for others, it is unclear if older adults exhibit the same self-other discrepancies. Here, we conducted 2 studies (88 and 124 participants, respectively) to examine self-other discrepancies in financial decision making under risk in older adults. We focused on 3 aspects of financial decision making: loss aversion (a tendency to weight potential losses more strongly than potential gains), risk-aversion asymmetry (a tendency to be risk-averse for potential gains and risk-seeking for potential losses), and risk preferences separately in gain and loss domains. Using computational modeling and behavioral economics tasks, we found weaker self-other discrepancies in older adults (compared with younger adults) across all 3 aspects. We also replicated the age differences in self-other discrepancies in loss aversion across 2 largely nonoverlapping cohorts. Thus, it appears that when making financial decisions on behalf of others, older adults, relative to younger adults, have a stronger disposition to regard others' financial outcomes as important as their own. (PsycINFO Database Record

Saliency modulates affective evaluations but not behavioral responses in the ultimatum game.

Although numerous studies have demonstrated that the saliency of perceptual information guides attention, the effect of perceptual saliency in high-level social situations remains unclear. Here, in a modified ultimatum game that included both gain and loss sharing, we highlighted either the fairness (fair or unfair) or the valence (gain or loss) aspect of a proposed offer using salient background colors with social meanings. The results showed that emotional responses to proposed offers were influenced by visual saliency. Specifically, individuals felt more dissatisfied about unfair (as opposed to fair) offers when fairness was emphasized than when valence was emphasized or no emphasis; and similarly, individuals felt more dissatisfied about loss situations compared to gain situations when valence was emphasized than when fairness was emphasized or no emphasis. However, this attentional modulation of social information led to changes only on affective responses but not on actual behavioral responses. Our findings indicate that attentional modulation of social information has a profound impact on affective evaluation by changing how information is weighed.

Multiple-protein detections of single-cells reveal cell-cell heterogeneity in human cells.

Cell population represents an intrinsically heterogeneous and stochastic system, in which individual cells often behave very differently in molecular contents, functions and even genotypes from the population average in response to uniform physiological stimuli. The traditional bulk cellular analysis often overlooks cellular heterogeneity and does not provide information on cell-cell variations. Single-cell measurements can reveal information obscured in population averages, and enable us to determine distributions rather than averaged properties within a cell population. The level of complexity, with numerous variables acting at the same time, requires multiparametric and dynamic investigation of a large number of single cells. Multiplexed study can provide quantitative correlations or inter-relationships among multiple cellular components and molecular markers within a protein network or family in biological processes. In this paper, we applied multiple fluorophore-conjugated primary antibodies to detect multiple proteins expressed on the same singe cells from a clonal population. To reveal cell-cell heterogeneity, we quantified the histograms of six proteins within a cell population as functions of TNF-α stimulation time. Then, we quantified noise and noise strength of these protein histograms as functions of TNF-α stimulation time. Thirdly, we quantified correlation coefficients of multiple proteins expressed on same single-cells as functions of TNF-α stimulation time. Above parameters demonstrated nonlinear relationships with TNF-α stimulation. Quantification of above parameters on independent cell subpopulations further reveals the cell-cell heterogeneity when exposed to identical environmental conditions. Such cellular heterogeneity will be useful to characterize the disease progression and disease diagnoses.

Quantitative and multiplexed study of endothelial cell inflammation.

Endothelial inflammation plays major roles in all phases of the atherosclerotic process, the leading cause of death by cardiovascular disease. Both innate immunity and endothelial adhesion molecules contribute to endothelial inflammation. In this work, we applied multiple antibodies (Abs) to measure changes in expression levels of six proteins in response to inflammatory stimulation. These six proteins include toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) and toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) representing innate immunity and four endothelial adhesion molecules such as vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1), intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), E-selectin, and P-selectin. We observed two different types of dynamic behaviors among these proteins upon inflammatory stimulation. Increased expression of toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2), P-selectin, E-selectin, and TLR4 peaked relatively early (after 4 h of stimulation) while VCAM-1, and ICAM-1 showed a more gradual and consistent increase in expression with stimulatory time. The magnitude of this increase was significantly greater for VCAM-1 and ICAM-1. The multiplexed detection developed in this study using fluorophore-conjugated primary Abs provides an approach for live cell and in vivo imaging of endothelium inflammation for quantitative characterization of multiple proteins within a network.