Scholars@Duke
Gregory Russell Samanez-Larkin

Gregory Russell Samanez-Larkin

Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor
Psychology & Neuroscience
g.samanezlarkin@duke.edu
LSRC, Box 90999, Durham, NC 27708
LSRC, Box 90999, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours

Selected Publications

Overconfidence and Financial Risk Tolerance in Older Age.

Journal Article The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · February 2025 Excessive financial risk taking in older age can have harmful consequences as opportunities to recover lost wealth are limited. Understanding financial risk taking in older age is important for identifying vulnerabilities and developing interventions to em ... Full text Cite

Preserved memory for decisions across adulthood.

Journal Article Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition · September 2024 Remembering our decisions is crucial - it allows us to learn from past mistakes and construct future behavior. However, it is unclear if age-related memory declines impact the memorability of older adults' decisions. Here, we compared younger and older adu ... Full text Cite

Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.

Journal Article Journal of applied research in memory and cognition · March 2024 Communicating information about health risks empowers individuals to make informed decisions. To identify effective communication strategies, we manipulated the specificity, self-relevance, and emotional framing of messages designed to motivate information ... Full text Cite

Adult age-related differences in susceptibility to social conformity pressures in self-control over daily desires.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · February 2024 Developmental literature suggests that susceptibility to social conformity pressure peaks in adolescence and disappears with maturity into early adulthood. Predictions about these behaviors are less clear for middle-aged and older adults. On the one hand, ... Full text Cite

Adult Age Differences in Evoked Emotional Responses to Dynamic Facial Expressions.

Journal Article The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · January 2024 ObjectivesFacial expressions are powerful social signals that motivate feelings and actions in the observer. Research on face processing has overwhelmingly used static facial images, which have limited ecological validity. Previous research on the ... Full text Cite

Heuristic decision-making across adulthood.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · September 2023 In general, research on aging and decision-making has grown in recent years. Yet, little work has investigated how reliance on classic heuristics may differ across adulthood. For example, younger adults rely on the availability of information from memory w ... Full text Cite

Decision Making across Adulthood during Physical Distancing.

Journal Article Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn · January 2023 Covid-19-related social-distancing measures have dramatically limited physical social contact between individuals and increased monetary and health concerns for individuals of all ages. We wondered how these new societal conditions would impact the choices ... Full text Link to item Cite

Reasons for Receiving or Not Receiving Bivalent COVID-19 Booster Vaccinations Among Adults - United States, November 1-December 10, 2022.

Journal Article MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report · January 2023 Bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccines, developed to protect against both ancestral and Omicron BA.4/BA.5 variants, are recommended to increase protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and severe disease* (1,2). However, relatively few eligible U.S. adults have ... Full text Cite

Multivariate associations between dopamine receptor availability and risky investment decision-making across adulthood.

Journal Article Cerebral cortex communications · January 2023 Enhancing dopamine increases financial risk taking across adulthood but it is unclear whether baseline individual differences in dopamine function are related to risky financial decisions. Here, thirty-five healthy adults completed an incentive-compatible ... Full text Cite

Communicating COVID-19 exposure risk with an interactive website counteracts risk misestimation.

Journal Article PLoS One · 2023 During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals depended on risk information to make decisions about everyday behaviors and public policy. Here, we assessed whether an interactive website influenced individuals' risk tolerance to support public health goals. We ... Full text Link to item Cite

Temporal discounting across adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · February 2022 A number of developmental theories have been proposed that make differential predictions about the links between age and temporal discounting, or the devaluation of future rewards. Most empirical studies examining adult age differences in temporal discount ... Full text Cite

Can the Past Hinder Investor Learning?

Journal Article · November 30, 2021 Cite

Pairing facts with imagined consequences improves pandemic-related risk perception.

Journal Article Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A · August 10, 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic reached staggering new peaks during a global resurgence more than a year after the crisis began. Although public health guidelines initially helped to slow the spread of disease, widespread pandemic fatigue and prolonged harm to finan ... Full text Link to item Cite

Imagining a Personalized Scenario Selectively Increases Perceived Risk of Viral Transmission for Older Adults.

Journal Article Nat Aging · August 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public-health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to COVID-19; as of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths i ... Full text Link to item Cite

Emotion dynamics across adulthood in everyday life: Older adults are more emotionally stable and better at regulating desires.

Journal Article Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · April 2021 Older adults report experiencing improved emotional health, such as more intense positive affect and less intense negative affect. However, there are mixed findings on whether older adults are better at regulating emotion-a hallmark feature of emotional he ... Full text Open Access Cite

Dopaminergic modulation of reward discounting in healthy rats: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Journal Article Psychopharmacology · March 2021 RationaleAlthough numerous studies have suggested that pharmacological alteration of the dopamine (DA) system modulates reward discounting, these studies have produced inconsistent findings.ObjectivesHere, we conducted a systematic review ... Full text Cite

Pairing Facts with Imagined Consequences Improves Pandemic-Related Risk Perception

Journal Article · 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic reached staggering new peaks during a global resurgence more than a year after the crisis began. Although public health guidelines initially helped to slow the spread of disease, widespread pandemic fatigue and prolonged harm to fi ... Full text Cite

Imagining a Personalized Scenario Selectively Increases Perceived Risk of Viral Transmission for Older Adults

Journal Article · 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public-health emergency. Older adults have been at significantly greater risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to COVID-19; as of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related death ... Full text Cite

Multivariate associations between dopamine receptor availability and risky investment decision making across adulthood

Journal Article · 2021 Pharmacological manipulations have revealed that enhancing dopamine increases financial risk taking across adulthood. However, it is unclear whether baseline individual differences in dopamine function, assessed using PET imaging, are related to performanc ... Full text Cite

Dopamine biases sensitivity to personal goals and social influence in self-control over everyday desires

Journal Article · 2021 People regularly give in to daily temptations in spite of conflict with personal goals. To test hypotheses about neuropharmacological influences on self-control, we used positron emission tomography to measure dopamine D2-like receptors (D2R) and experienc ... Full text Cite

Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams.

Journal Article Nature · June 2020 Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same datas ... Full text Link to item Cite

Advances in Emotion-Regulation Choice from Experience Sampling.

Journal Article Trends in cognitive sciences · May 2020 Recent experience-sampling studies by Blanke et al. and Grommisch et al. provide insights into how individuals regulate their emotions in daily life. The rich datasets accessible from experience sampling allow researchers to detect nuances in the relations ... Full text Open Access Cite

Age Effects in Sequence-Construction for a Continuous Cognitive Task: Similar Sequence-Trends but Fewer Switch-Points.

Journal Article The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · March 2020 ObjectivesMany real-life settings require decision makers to sort a predetermined set of outcomes or activities into a preferred sequence and people vary in whether they prefer to tackle the most challenging aspects first, leave them for the last, ... Full text Cite

Age Differences in Intertemporal Choice: The Role of Task Type, Outcome Characteristics, and Covariates.

Journal Article The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · January 2020 ObjectivesPrior research has revealed age differences in the preferred timing of monetary outcomes, but results are inconsistent across studies. The present study examined the role of task type, outcome characteristics, and a range of theoreticall ... Full text Cite

Dopaminergic modulation of reward discounting in healthy rats: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Journal Article · 2020 Although numerous studies have suggested that pharmacological alteration of the dopamine (DA) system modulates reward discounting, these studies have produced inconsistent findings. Here, we conducted a systematic review and pre-registered meta-analysis to ... Full text Cite

Overconfidence in financial knowledge associated with financial risk tolerance in older adults

Journal Article · 2020 Taking excessive financial risk in older age can have harmful, far-reaching consequences as opportunities to recover lost wealth are limited. Better understanding the mechanisms of financial risk taking in older age is critically important for both iden ... Full text Cite

Temporal Discounting Across Adulthood: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Journal Article · 2020 A number of developmental theories have been proposed that make differential predictions about the links between age and temporal discounting, or the devaluation of future rewards. Most empirical studies examining adult age differences in temporal disco ... Full text Cite

Decision making across adulthood during physical distancing

Journal Article · 2020 Covid-19-related social-distancing measures have dramatically limited physical social contact between individuals and increased monetary and health concerns for individuals of all ages. We wondered how these new societal conditions would impact the choi ... Full text Cite

Adult age differences in evoked emotional responses to dynamic facial expressions

Journal Article · 2020 Objective: Facial expressions are powerful social signals that motivate feelings and action in the observer. Research on face processing has overwhelmingly used static facial images, which are limited in their ecological validity. Previous research on t ... Full text Cite

Exercise, Dopamine, and Cognition in Older Age.

Journal Article Trends in cognitive sciences · December 2019 Jonasson et al. investigated whether individual differences in human dopamine receptors (D2R) were related to cognitive performance before and after a 6-month aerobic exercise intervention (compared with active control). While D2R decreased (perhaps counte ... Full text Cite

Mesolimbic dopamine D2 receptors and neural representations of subjective value.

Journal Article Scientific reports · December 2019 The process by which the value of delayed rewards is discounted varies from person to person. It has been suggested that these individual differences in subjective valuation of delayed rewards are supported by mesolimbic dopamine D2-like receptors (D2Rs) i ... Full text Cite

Reproducibility of the correlative triad among aging, dopamine receptor availability, and cognition.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · November 2019 The evidence that dopamine function mediates the association between aging and cognition is one of the most cited findings in the cognitive neuroscience of aging. However, few and relatively small studies have directly examined these associations. Here we ... Full text Cite

Reduced serotonin receptors and transporters in normal aging adults: a meta-analysis of PET and SPECT imaging studies.

Journal Article Neurobiology of aging · August 2019 Alterations in serotonin (5-HT) function have been hypothesized to underlie a range of physiological, emotional, and cognitive changes in older age. Here, we conducted a quantitative synthesis and comparison of the effects of age on 5-HT receptors and tran ... Full text Cite

Differential regional decline in dopamine receptor availability across adulthood: Linear and nonlinear effects of age.

Journal Article Human brain mapping · July 2019 Theories of adult brain development, based on neuropsychological test results and structural neuroimaging, suggest differential rates of age-related change in function across cortical and subcortical sub-regions. However, it remains unclear if these trends ... Full text Cite

Partial-volume correction increases estimated dopamine D2-like receptor binding potential and reduces adult age differences.

Journal Article Journal of cerebral blood flow and metabolism : official journal of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism · May 2019 The relatively modest spatial resolution of positron emission tomography (PET) increases the likelihood of partial volume effects such that binding potential (BPND) may be underestimated. Given structural grey matter losses across adulthood, par ... Full text Cite

Emotion identification across adulthood using the Dynamic FACES database of emotional expressions in younger, middle aged, and older adults.

Journal Article Cognition & emotion · March 2019 Facial stimuli are widely used in behavioural and brain science research to investigate emotional facial processing. However, some studies have demonstrated that dynamic expressions elicit stronger emotional responses compared to static images. To address ... Full text Cite

Preferences for Temporal Sequences of Real Outcomes Differ Across Domains but do not Vary by Age.

Journal Article The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · February 2019 ObjectivesPeople's preferences for temporal sequences of events have implications for life-long health and well-being. Prior research suggests that other aspects of intertemporal choice vary by age, but evidence for age differences in sequence-pre ... Full text Cite

Lack of consistent sex differences in D-amphetamine-induced dopamine release measured with [18F]fallypride PET.

Journal Article Psychopharmacology · February 2019 RationaleSex differences in the dopaminergic response to psychostimulants could have implications for drug abuse risk and other psychopathology involving the dopamine system, but human data are limited and mixed.ObjectivesHere, we sought ... Full text Cite

Individual Differences in Dopamine Are Associated with Reward Discounting in Clinical Groups But Not in Healthy Adults.

Journal Article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · January 2019 Some people are more willing to make immediate, risky, or costly reward-focused choices than others, which has been hypothesized to be associated with individual differences in dopamine (DA) function. In two studies using PET imaging, one empirical (Study ... Full text Cite

Emotion dynamics across adulthood in everyday life: Older adults are more emotionally stable and better at regulating desires

Journal Article · 2019 Older adults report experiencing improved emotional health, such as more intense positive affect and less intense negative affect. However, there are mixed findings on whether older adults are better at regulating emotion—a hallmark feature of emotional ... Full text Open Access Cite

Ventral striatal dopamine transporter availability is associated with lower trait motor impulsivity in healthy adults.

Journal Article Translational psychiatry · December 2018 Impulsivity is a transdiagnostic feature of a range of externalizing psychiatric disorders. Preclinical work links reduced ventral striatal dopamine transporter (DAT) availability with heightened impulsivity and novelty seeking. However, there is a lack of ... Full text Cite

Reduced serotonin receptors and transporters in normal aging adults: a meta-analysis of PET and SPECT imaging studies

Journal Article · September 27, 2018 Abstract Alterations in serotonin (5-HT) function have been hypothesized to underlie a range of physiological, emotional, and cognitive changes in older age. Here, we conducted a quantitative synthesis and comparison of the effects of age on 5-HT receptors ... Full text Cite

Distinct neural circuits support incentivized inhibition.

Journal Article NeuroImage · September 2018 The ability to inhibit responses under high stakes, or "incentivized inhibition," is critical for adaptive impulse control. While previous research indicates that right ventrolateral prefrontal cortical (VLPFC) activity plays a key role in response inhibit ... Full text Cite

FTO affects food cravings and interacts with age to influence age-related decline in food cravings.

Journal Article Physiology & behavior · August 2018 The fat mass and obesity associated gene (FTO) was the first gene identified by genome-wide association studies to correlate with higher body mass index (BMI) and increased odds of obesity. FTO remains the locus with the largest and most replicated effect ... Full text Cite

Individual differences in dopamine D2 receptor availability correlate with reward valuation.

Journal Article Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · August 2018 Reward valuation, which underlies all value-based decision-making, has been associated with dopamine function in many studies of nonhuman animals, but there is relatively less direct evidence for an association in humans. Here, we measured dopamine D2 ... Full text Cite

Foraging, exploration, or search? On the (lack of) convergent validity between three behavioral paradigms

Journal Article Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences · July 1, 2018 Recently it has been suggested that individual humans and other animals possess different levels of a general tendency to explore or exploit that may influence behavior in different contexts. In the present work, we investigated whether individual differen ... Full text Cite

Individual differences in loss aversion and preferences for skewed risks across adulthood.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · June 2018 In a previous study, we found adult age differences in the tendency to accept more positively skewed gambles (with a small chance of a large win) than other equivalent risks, or an age-related positive-skew bias. In the present study, we examined whether l ... Full text Cite

Subjective value representations during effort, probability and time discounting across adulthood.

Journal Article Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · May 2018 Every day, humans make countless decisions that require the integration of information about potential benefits (i.e. rewards) with other decision features (i.e. effort required, probability of an outcome or time delays). Here, we examine the overlap and d ... Full text Cite

Emotional arousal may increase susceptibility to fraud in older and younger adults.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · March 2018 Financial fraud is a societal problem for adults of all ages, but financial losses are especially damaging to older adults who typically live on fixed incomes and have less time to recoup losses. Persuasion tactics used by fraud perpetrators often elicit h ... Full text Cite

Social Function and Motivation in the Aging Brain

Journal Article · 2018 In this chapter, we review some themes from the emerging literature on the social neuroscience of aging. Much of the research thus far focuses on abilities at the intersection of social function and emotion, such as empathy or thinking about the self or ... Full text Cite

Individual differences in skewed financial risk-taking across the adult life span.

Journal Article Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · December 2017 Older adults are disproportionately targeted by fraud schemes that advertise unlikely but large returns (positively skewed risks). We examined adult age differences in choice and neural activity as individuals considered risky gambles. Gambles were symmetr ... Full text Cite

Reduced dopamine receptors and transporters but not synthesis capacity in normal aging adults: a meta-analysis.

Journal Article Neurobiology of aging · September 2017 Many theories of cognitive aging are based on evidence that dopamine (DA) declines with age. Here, we performed a systematic meta-analysis of cross-sectional positron emission tomography and single-photon emission-computed tomography studies on the average ... Full text Cite

Spontaneous Eye Blink Rate (EBR) Is Uncorrelated with Dopamine D2 Receptor Availability and Unmodulated by Dopamine Agonism in Healthy Adults.

Journal Article eNeuro · September 2017 Spontaneous eye blink rate (EBR) has been proposed as a noninvasive, inexpensive marker of dopamine functioning. Support for a relation between EBR and dopamine function comes from observations that EBR is altered in populations with dopamine dysfunction a ... Full text Cite

Disrupted Prefrontal Regulation of Striatal Subjective Value Signals in Psychopathy.

Journal Article Neuron · July 2017 Psychopathy is a personality disorder with strong links to criminal behavior. While research on psychopathy has focused largely on socio-affective dysfunction, recent data suggest that aberrant decision making may also play an important role. Yet, the circ ... Full text Cite

Reduced effects of age on dopamine D2 receptor levels in physically active adults.

Journal Article NeuroImage · March 2017 Physical activity has been shown to ameliorate dopaminergic degeneration in non-human animal models. However, the effects of regular physical activity on normal age-related changes in dopamine function in humans are unknown. Here we present cross-sectional ... Full text Cite

Dread sensitivity in decisions about real and imagined electrical shocks does not vary by age.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · December 2016 Previous research has found age differences in intertemporal choices that involve trade-offs among events or outcomes that occur at different points in time, but these findings were mostly limited to hypothetical financial and consumer choices. We examined ... Full text Cite

Adult age differences in decision making across domains: Increased discounting of social and health-related rewards.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · November 2016 Although research on aging and decision making continues to grow, the majority of studies examine decisions made to maximize monetary earnings or points. It is not clear whether these results generalize to other types of rewards. To investigate this, we ex ... Full text Cite

Associations between dopamine D2 receptor availability and BMI depend on age.

Journal Article NeuroImage · September 2016 ObjectiveThe dopamine D2/3 receptor subtypes (DRD2/3) are the most widely studied neurotransmitter biomarker in research on obesity, but results to date have been inconsistent, have typically involved small samples, and have rarely accounted for s ... Full text Cite

Stability and change in risk-taking propensity across the adult life span.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · September 2016 Can risk-taking propensity be thought of as a trait that captures individual differences across domains, measures, and time? Studying stability in risk-taking propensities across the life span can help to answer such questions by uncovering parallel, or di ... Full text Cite

The Effects of Methylphenidate on Resting-State Functional Connectivity of the Basal Nucleus of Meynert, Locus Coeruleus, and Ventral Tegmental Area in Healthy Adults.

Journal Article Frontiers in human neuroscience · January 2016 BackgroundMethylphenidate (MPH) influences catecholaminergic signaling. Extant work examined the effects of MPH on the neural circuits of attention and cognitive control, but few studies have investigated the effect of MPH on the brain's resting-s ... Full text Cite

White-Matter Tract Connecting Anterior Insula to Nucleus Accumbens Correlates with Reduced Preference for Positively Skewed Gambles.

Journal Article Neuron · January 2016 Individuals sometimes show inconsistent risk preferences, including excessive attraction to gambles featuring small chances of winning large amounts (called "positively skewed" gambles). While functional neuroimaging research indicates that nucleus accumbe ... Full text Cite

Caudate asymmetry is related to attentional impulsivity and an objective measure of ADHD-like attentional problems in healthy adults.

Journal Article Brain structure & function · January 2016 Case-control studies comparing ADHD with typically developing individuals suggest that anatomical asymmetry of the caudate nucleus is a marker of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, there is no consensus on whether the asymmetry favor ... Full text Cite

Decision making in the ageing brain: changes in affective and motivational circuits.

Journal Article Nature reviews. Neuroscience · May 2015 Featured Publication As the global population ages, older decision makers will be required to take greater responsibility for their own physical, psychological and financial well-being. With this in mind, researchers have begun to examine the effects of ageing on decision maki ... Full text Cite

Chapter 3 - Decision Neuroscience and Aging

Chapter · February 23, 2015 Over the past several years, a subfield of the cognitive neuroscience of aging has emerged to investigate age differences in reward-based decision making across adulthood. The approach combines experimental methods, models, and theory from psychology, econ ... Full text Cite

Chapter 2 - Modeling Cost-Benefit Decision Making in Aged Rodents

Chapter · February 23, 2015 Aging can impact choices between alternatives that differ with respect to relative benefits and "costs" (e.g., time delays or risk); however, much remains to be learned about the specific cognitive, affective, and neural factors that govern choice behavior ... Full text Cite

Mechanisms of motivation-cognition interaction: challenges and opportunities.

Journal Article Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci · June 2014 Recent years have seen a rejuvenation of interest in studies of motivation-cognition interactions arising from many different areas of psychology and neuroscience. The present issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience provides a sampling of ... Full text Link to item Cite

Adult age differences in frontostriatal representation of prediction error but not reward outcome.

Journal Article Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · June 2014 Emerging evidence from decision neuroscience suggests that although younger and older adults show similar frontostriatal representations of reward magnitude, older adults often show deficits in feedback-driven reinforcement learning. In the present study, ... Full text Open Access Cite

Financial decision making across adulthood

Chapter · April 1, 2014 Choices about money have serious consequences both for individuals and society, as reckless spending by young adults and financial scamming of the elderly all too clearly demonstrate. Recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience suggests that financial ... Full text Cite

Caudate responses to reward anticipation associated with delay discounting behavior in healthy youth.

Journal Article Developmental cognitive neuroscience · January 2014 BackgroundChoices requiring delay of gratification made during adolescence can have significant impact on life trajectory. Willingness to delay gratification can be measured using delay discounting tasks that require a choice between a smaller imm ... Full text Cite

Affective traits link to reliable neural markers of incentive anticipation.

Journal Article NeuroImage · January 2014 While theorists have speculated that different affective traits are linked to reliable brain activity during anticipation of gains and losses, few have directly tested this prediction. We examined these associations in a community sample of healthy human a ... Full text Cite

Mechanisms of age-related decline in memory search across the adult life span.

Journal Article Developmental psychology · December 2013 Three alternative mechanisms for age-related decline in memory search have been proposed, which result from either reduced processing speed (global slowing hypothesis), overpersistence on categories (cluster-switching hypothesis), or the inability to maint ... Full text Cite

A thalamocorticostriatal dopamine network for psychostimulant-enhanced human cognitive flexibility.

Journal Article Biological psychiatry · July 2013 BackgroundEveryday life demands continuous flexibility in thought and behavior. We examined whether individual differences in dopamine function are related to variability in the effects of amphetamine on one aspect of flexibility: task switching.< ... Full text Cite

Financial Decision Making and the Aging Brain.

Journal Article APS observer · June 2013 Cite

Moment-to-moment brain signal variability: a next frontier in human brain mapping?

Journal Article Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · May 2013 Neuroscientists have long observed that brain activity is naturally variable from moment-to-moment, but neuroimaging research has largely ignored the potential importance of this phenomenon. An emerging research focus on within-person brain signal variabil ... Full text Cite

Correspondence Are Cognitive Functions Localizable?

Journal Article JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES · March 1, 2013 Link to item Cite

Brain, Decision, and Debt

Chapter · January 24, 2013 This chapter summarizes recent findings in neuroeconomics suggesting that emotion (specifically, "anticipatory affect") can influence financial decisions. It then discusses how individual differences in anticipatory affect may promote proneness to consumer ... Full text Cite

Serotonergic genotypes, neuroticism, and financial choices.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2013 Life financial outcomes carry a significant heritable component, but the mechanisms by which genes influence financial choices remain unclear. Focusing on a polymorphism in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), we found that ind ... Full text Cite

Frontostriatal white matter integrity mediates adult age differences in probabilistic reward learning.

Journal Article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · April 2012 Frontostriatal circuits have been implicated in reward learning, and emerging findings suggest that frontal white matter structural integrity and probabilistic reward learning are reduced in older age. This cross-sectional study examined whether age differ ... Full text Cite

Introduction to decision making over the life span.

Journal Article Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · October 2011 Full text Cite

Age differences in risky choice: a meta-analysis.

Journal Article Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · October 2011 Does risk taking change as a function of age? We conducted a systematic literature search and found 29 comparisons between younger and older adults on behavioral tasks thought to measure risk taking (N= 4,093). The reports relied on various tasks differing ... Full text Cite

Expected value information improves financial risk taking across the adult life span.

Journal Article Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · April 2011 When making decisions, individuals must often compensate for cognitive limitations, particularly in the face of advanced age. Recent findings suggest that age-related variability in striatal activity may increase financial risk-taking mistakes in older adu ... Full text Cite

Emotional experience improves with age: evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · March 2011 Recent evidence suggests that emotional well-being improves from early adulthood to old age. This study used experience-sampling to examine the developmental course of emotional experience in a representative sample of adults spanning early to very late ad ... Full text Cite

Age Differences in Striatal Delay Sensitivity during Intertemporal Choice in Healthy Adults.

Journal Article Frontiers in neuroscience · January 2011 Intertemporal choices are a ubiquitous class of decisions that involve selecting between outcomes available at different times in the future. We investigated the neural systems supporting intertemporal decisions in healthy younger and older adults. Using f ... Full text Open Access Cite

Gain and loss learning differentially contribute to life financial outcomes.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2011 Emerging findings imply that distinct neurobehavioral systems process gains and losses. This study investigated whether individual differences in gain learning and loss learning might contribute to different life financial outcomes (i.e., assets versus deb ... Full text Cite

Variability in nucleus accumbens activity mediates age-related suboptimal financial risk taking.

Journal Article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · January 2010 As human life expectancy continues to rise, financial decisions of aging investors may have an increasing impact on the global economy. In this study, we examined age differences in financial decisions across the adult life span by combining functional neu ... Full text Cite

Selective attention to emotion in the aging brain.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · September 2009 A growing body of research suggests that the ability to regulate emotion remains stable or improves across the adult life span. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that this pattern of findings reflects the prioritization of emotional goals. Given ... Full text Cite

Replicating the positivity effect in picture memory in Koreans: evidence for cross-cultural generalizability.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · September 2009 Older adults' relatively better memory for positive over negative material (positivity effect) has been widely observed in Western samples. This study examined whether a relative preference for positive over negative material is also observed in older Kore ... Full text Cite

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow: Individual differences in future self-continuity account for saving.

Journal Article Judgment and decision making · June 2009 Some people find it more difficult to delay rewards than others. In three experiments, we tested a "future self-continuity" hypothesis that individual differences in the perception of one's present self as continuous with a future self would be associated ... Cite

Group comparisons: imaging the aging brain.

Journal Article Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · September 2008 With the recent growth of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists across a range of disciplines are comparing neural activity between groups of interest, such as healthy controls and clinical patients, children and young adults and younger ... Full text Cite

Individual differences in insular sensitivity during loss anticipation predict avoidance learning.

Journal Article Psychological science · April 2008 The anterior insula has been implicated in both the experience and the anticipation of negative outcomes. Although individual differences in insular sensitivity have been associated with self-report measures of chronic anxiety, previous research has not ex ... Full text Cite

Anticipation of monetary gain but not loss in healthy older adults.

Journal Article Nature neuroscience · June 2007 Although global declines in structure have been documented in the aging human brain, little is known about the functional integrity of the striatum and prefrontal cortex in older adults during incentive processing. We used event-related functional magnetic ... Full text Cite

Divergent trajectories in the aging mind: changes in working memory for affective versus visual information with age.

Journal Article Psychology and aging · December 2005 Working memory mediates the short-term maintenance of information. Virtually all empirical research on working memory involves investigations of working memory for verbal and visual information. Whereas aging is typically associated with a deficit in worki ... Full text Cite

Emotional category data on images from the International Affective Picture System.

Journal Article Behavior research methods · November 2005 The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is widely used in studies of emotion and has been characterized primarily along the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Even though research has shown that the IAPS is useful in the study of disc ... Full text Cite

What good are positive emotions in crises? A prospective study of resilience and emotions following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11th, 2001.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · February 2003 Extrapolating from B. L. Fredrickson's (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, the authors hypothesized that positive emotions are active ingredients within trait resilience. U.S. college students (18 men and 28 women) were tested in ea ... Full text Cite