关注自身得失对朋友得失共情的影响

在金钱博弈任务中让被试暗中操控对朋友赢或输的赏罚金额。结果发现,当被试与朋友一起参与博弈时,较之于仅仅观看朋友博弈,对其赌赢的奖赏金额有了明显的降低,而对其赌输的惩罚金额没有受到显著影响。而且,自己输要比自身赢的前提下对朋友赌赢的奖赏更低,但对朋友赌输的惩罚金额则不受自身得失的影响。这说明,关注自身的得失会减弱对朋友获益的共情水平,而不会影响对其损失的共情程度。     

Coping With Losses and Past Trauma In Old Age: The Separation-Individuation Perspective

Abstract

Old age is a stage in life in which numerous changes associated with loss can be expected to occur in major life domains. Deterioration of health; retirement; relocation; occupational and financial loss; loss of social roles, identity, status, and support; and the loss of spouse and significant others (siblings, friends) pose an ongoing threat to everyday functioning, forcing the individual to adapt. Thus, effective functioning in daily life represents a major developmental task for the aging (Bakes & Carstensen, 1996; Marsiske, Lang, Bakes, & Bakes, 1995). There is marked variability in adjustment among the elderly, and despite the numerous losses associated with aging, many elderly people are well adjusted and report experiencing high levels of well-being (George & Clipp, 1991;Wetle, 1990).     

Old Age:

According to the research of gerontologists, old age is not as bad as many negative stereotypes portray. However, the crises of loss, physical decline, and social oppression are spiritually difficult for many older persons. This article suggests that we develop images of the latter part of life that are honest with both the possibilities and the dangers. The ministry of the church involves much more than "taking care of" fragile older persons. We must also challenge ourselves to be open to the crises through which God transforms our individual and corporate lives at all ages.     

Mortal Losses, Vital Gains: The Role of Spirituality

Grief and its management constitute the general topic of this paper. A personal dynamic of reframing is articulated and defined as a major experiential source of human spirituality. The argument is that exercises in the comparative free association of loss activate dynamic reframing amidst mourning and its associated work of depression. Counselling that involves imagining worse case scenarios may invoke conventional religious belief and practice as constructive tactics of make-believe, ones that actually enlarge perspective and cast past losses into widening horizons of future gains. In effect, human spirituality is an individual's achieved capacity to affirm time and again that his or her great personal losses could have been far worse, in spite of the emotional turmoil and woe surrounding such events.     

Prospect Theory in Political Science: Gains and Losses From the First Decade

Prospect theory offers a number of advantages that justify its use in the analysis of political behavior, but it also has some aspects that limit its wider applicability in political contexts. This article reviews recent research highlighting these successes and limitations. Future research on the incorporation of prospect theory into models of political behavior should focus on such areas as group decision-making, reference point specification, and emotion.     

Between Midlife and Old Age:

This article is based on taped interviews with 56 women, individually and in groups, between the ages of 60 and 70, as well as my own experience as a woman past 65. Discussions with my friends and colleagues in this age group also contributed to my thinking. My sense is that the seventh decade is one of numerous transitions in the lives of women, and that these transitions require extensive, varied, and often painful opportunities for learning. Furthermore, the proximity to life's ending also acts as a strong motivator for engaging in activities that had previously been put off; these include a variety of self-selected and often pleasurable learning experiences. The learning that takes place at this age is rarely acknowledged; it is more likely to be overshadowed by the ageist assumption that old people lost their ability to learn or even to comprehend new information, and by the sexist assumption that women are incapable of making intelligent and practical decisions. These interviews and informal discussion contradict such stereotypical misinformation about old women, showing instead a high level of personal and interpersonal learning, as well as the development of extensive and creative new coping strategies.     

Equal Protection versus Free Speech Rights: When Gains Loom Larger than Losses

This paper examines the tension between equal protection and free speech in the hate speech context through a prospect theory lens. Two hundred and fifty‐four participants recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk read a First Amendment free speech or Fourteenth Amendment equal protection argument framed to endorse the protections gained by each right, the losses avoided by each right, or the security provided by each right. Results showed gain‐framing was more persuasive than loss‐framing. Participant race and constitutional principle influenced punishment invoked for cross burning but not destruction of property or trespassing. Participants who received a positive framed equal protection argument believed the target would experience stronger negative emotions, particularly under low intimidation. Furthermore, participants receiving a positive frame speech argument believed the target would be less willing to support suppression. Unlike previous research, which suggests an equal protection principle default, this study demonstrated an impact of framed statements on decisions.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Uncertainty Avoidance Influences Choices for Potential Gains but not Losses

Uncertainty of outcomes is a primary dimension underlying human judgment and decision making, and is a defining feature of risk. Even though uncertainty almost always exists in decision making contexts, individuals and cultures vary in their preference for avoiding uncertainty. This study examines how uncertainty avoidance influences judgments involving uncertain and risky alternatives. Participants were presented with problems that involve potential gains or losses and contain options reflecting uncertain or certain outcomes. Greater uncertainty avoidance predicted choices for uncertain outcomes that involved gains, which tend to promote risk aversion, but not for uncertain outcomes that led to losses, which tend to promote risk seeking. These results demonstrate that culturally-relevant dispositions such as uncertain avoidance can have complex effects on judgment.     

Personality and Memory in Old Age

We examined the impact of personality on episodic memory performance in a sample of 287 healthy adults aged 68-95 years. Extraversion and neuroticism were assessed with a standardized personality inventory. Episodic memory was assessed with an everyday task. Results from regression analyses controlling for the effects of age, gender, and education show that higher extraversion and lower neuroticism are associated with higher episodic memory performance. In addition, the strength of the correlations between neuroticism and episodic memory declined with increasing age in a male sub-sample, revealing an interaction between age and neuroticism.     

Strength of Preference and Effects of Valence in the Domains of Gains and Losses

In comparative judgments that follow binary choices, judgments of “How much better is a preferred option?” and “How much worse is a less preferred option?” may differ in their magnitudes (“valence effects”). This paper analyzed cognitive processes that underlie positive valence effects (“Better” exceeding “Worse”) and negative valence effects (Worse exceeding Better). My analyses used a “focus shift model.” The focus shift model postulates that choice options are represented as sets of desirable and undesirable features. Difference judgments are reached by assigning subjective weights onto such features and integrating weighted feature contributions. Positive and negative valence effects reflect the differences in subjective weighting depending on valence of judgments. Experiments 1 through 3 showed that systematic positive valence effects were observed in the domain of gains, whereas negative valence effects were observed in the domain of losses. Estimates of subjective weights showed that valence effects occurred when participants heavily weighted desirable features in preferred options and undesirable features in less preferred options. These patterns of subjective weighting for positive and negative valence effects were consistent with the focus shift model. Data were more consistent with the focus shift model over alternative explanations of valence effects. Relationship with relevant economic and psychological phenomena are discussed.     

Learning to Attend and to Ignore Is a Matter of Gains and Losses

ABSTRACT— Efficient goal-directed behavior in a crowded world is crucially mediated by visual selective attention (VSA), which regulates deployment of cognitive resources toward selected, behaviorally relevant visual objects. Acting as a filter on perceptual representations, VSA allows preferential processing of relevant objects and concurrently inhibits traces of irrelevant items, thus preventing harmful distraction. Recent evidence showed that monetary rewards for performance on VSA tasks strongly affect immediately subsequent deployment of attention; a typical aftereffect of VSA (negative priming) was found only following highly rewarded selections. Here we report a much more striking demonstration that the controlled delivery of monetary rewards also affects attentional processing several days later. Thus, the propensity to select or to ignore specific visual objects appears to be strongly biased by the more or less rewarding consequences of past attentional encounters with the same objects.     

Improving Attention in Old Age

The aim of this study was to examine whether a mindful intervention, based on noticing distinctions, could be used to improve the attention of older individuals. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four attention interventions. In the mindfulness groups, participants studying a set of pictures were told to notice either three or five distinctions. In the control groups, participants were either told to pay attention or were not given any directions related to attention before exposure to the set of pictures. The results indicated that those who viewed the stimuli in terms of distinctions were able to remember significantly more pictures than did those in the control groups. Distinction drawing also increased liking for the stimuli. The findings suggest that if older individuals want to increase attention and recall, rather than focus their attention, they may want to find ways to vary their attention.     

Individual Differences in Delay Discounting: Differences are Quantitative with Gains,but Qualitative with Losses

Research on delay discounting and inter‐temporal choice has yielded significant insights into decision making. Although research has focused on delayed gains, the discounting of losses is potentially important in precisely those areas where the discounting of gains has proved informative (e.g., substance use and abuse). Participants in the current study completed both a questionnaire consisting of choices between immediate and delayed gains and an analogous questionnaire consisting of choices between immediate and delayed losses. For almost all participants, the likelihood of choosing the delayed gain decreased with increases in the wait until it would be received. In contrast, when losses (i.e., payments) were involved, different participants showed quite different patterns of choices. More specifically, although the majority of the participants became increasingly likely to choose to pay later as the delay was increased, some participants appeared to be debt averse, in that they were more likely to choose the immediate payment option when the delay was long than when it was brief. These debt‐averse participants also were more likely to choose to wait for a larger delayed gain than other participants and scored lower on Impulsiveness than those who showed the typical pattern of discounting delayed losses. Taken together, these results suggest that in the case of delayed gains, people differ only quantitatively (i.e., in how steeply they discount), whereas in the case of delayed losses, people differ qualitatively as well as quantitatively, contrary to the common assumption that a single impulsivity trait underlies choices between immediate and delayed outcomes. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于年龄建构的老化心理——一项深度访谈研究报告

为考察年龄建构的老化心理,采用质化深度访谈法收集资料,结合现象学分析法和使用扎根理论资料分析法分析资料,结果发现,年龄建构了“增龄即老化”以及拒老、服老、怯老、终老等老化心理。老年人先以“不老之心”抵抗生理性老化;后屈服于并认可“落伍者”和退休者的老年身份;再因老年病的常态化对成为“累赘”和“负担”感到担忧;最后在恐惧和无奈中向人生告别。研究评估了结果的描述型、解释型和评价型效度作,分别为5、4.77、4.38分。     

Institutional and Personal Adjustment in Old Age

Assertive behaviors, as measured by teachers, observers, and an experimental task, were related to each other and to Stanford-Binet intelligence scores. All measures of assertion were correlated with each other and with total IQ. Subsequent item analysis of the Binet showed that the more assertive children did better on certain items: comprehension, verbal, and discrimination. These results are discussed as are possible reasons for non-responsiveness of 20% of the sample and the implications of this for future research.     

A Simple Axiomatization of Binary Rank-Dependent Utility of Gains (Losses)

For binary gambles composed only of gains (losses) relative to a status quo, the rank-dependent utility model with a representation that is dense in intervals is shown to be equivalent to ten elementary properties plus event commutativity and a gamble partition assumption. The proof reduces to a (difficult) functional equation that has been solved by Aczél, Maksa, and Páles (in press).     

Quality of Life in Old Age: Problematic Issues

Quality of Life (QoL) is a concept widely used in gerontology, as well as in other fields such as anthropology, health sciences, psychology, sociology and political sciences. Historically, although Aristotle is considered as an antecedent, the term QoL emerged in about the sixties in scientific literature. In the field of ageing, it is considered as an outcome of projects, programmes, services or policies and is used for describing populations, contexts and individuals. QoL is considered by most experts as a multidimensional concept involving multiple domains (health, psychological, social and environmental), containing objective and subjective components. Nevertheless, in recent years, QoL has been reduced to the subjective appraisal, to health or to subjective psychological attributes such as well-being, happiness or life satisfaction. Moreover, conceptual confusions can be found between QoL and other concepts related to positive ageing. In this conceptually-driven paper, after reviewing a set of expert and lay conceptualizations of QoL and identifying the diversity of its components, three critical issues will be discussed: its reduction to health or to the subjective appraisal of a set of domains, the confusion of QoL with other subjective or positive concepts and, finally, its methodological reductionism to self-reports as an exclusive procedure for QoL data collection. From these criticisms some conceptual and methodological suggestions are proposed.     

Episodic Future Thinking Reduces Delay Discounting of Gains and Losses: The Role of Regulatory Focus1,2

We examined the moderating effect of regulatory foci on the efficacy of episodic future thinking in reducing delay discounting. We hypothesized that the impact of imagining positive future events (vs. recent positive events) on delay discounting of gains would be stronger for individuals with a high promotion focus than for those with a high prevention focus (Hypothesis 1). Conversely, the effects of imagining adverse future events (vs. recent negative events) on delay discounting of losses would be stronger for individuals with a high prevention focus than for those with a high promotion focus (Hypothesis 2). We conducted two experiments in which participants, randomly allocated to episodic future thinking (EFT) or episodic recent thinking (ERT) groups, completed a delayed discounting task of gain (Experiment 1) or loss (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 (N = 73) weakly supported Hypothesis 1; Experiment 2 (N = 99) did not support Hypothesis 2. Our findings suggest positive EFT is particularly effective for individuals with a high promotion focus compared to individuals with a high prevention focus, which further reveals how EFT attenuates delay discounting.     

Typical Intellectual Engagement and Cognition in Old Age

ABSTRACT

Typical Intellectual Engagement (TIE) comprises the preference to engage in cognitively demanding activities and has been proposed as a potential explanatory variable of individual differences in cognitive abilities. Little is known, however, about the factorial structure of TIE, its relations to socio-demographic variables, and its influence on intellectual functioning in old age. In the present study, data of 364 adults (65–81 years) from the Zurich Longitudinal Study on Cognitive Aging (ZULU) were used to investigate the factorial structure of TIE and to examine the hypothesis that TIE is associated more strongly with crystallized intelligence than with fluid intelligence in old age. A measurement model of a second order factor based on a structure of four correlated first order factors (Reading, Problem Solving, Abstract Thinking, and Intellectual Curiosity) evinced an excellent fit. After controlling for age, sex, and formal education, TIE was more strongly associated with crystallized intelligence than with fluid intelligence, comparable to results in younger persons. More detailed analyses showed that this association is mostly defined via Reading and Intellectual Curiosity.