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In addition to biological sex, gender, defined as the sociocultural dimension of being a woman or a man, plays a central role in health. However, there are so far few approaches to quantify gender in a retrospective manner in existing study datasets. We therefore aimed to develop a methodology that can be retrospectively applied to assess gender in existing cohorts. We used baseline data from the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II), obtained in 2009–2014 from 1869 participants aged 60 years and older. We identified 13 gender-related variables and used them to construct a gender score by using primary component and logistic regression analyses. Of these, nine variables contributed to a gender score: chronic stress, marital status, risk-taking behaviour, personality attributes: agreeableness, neuroticism, extraversion, loneliness, conscientiousness, and level of education. Females and males differed significantly in the distribution of the gender score, but a significant overlap was also found. Thus, we were able to develop a gender score in a retrospective manner from already collected data that characterized participants in addition to biological sex. This approach will allow researchers to introduce the notion of gender retrospectively into a large number of studies.

Older adults show a preference for positive information, which disappears under high task demands. We examined whether glucose can help older adults preserve their positivity effect (PE) under high cognitive load. One hundred and twenty-two adults (40 young and 42 older in Experiment 1; 40 older in Experiment 2) consumed a glucose (25 g) or a taste-matched placebo drink and completed an immediate recall task of emotional word-lists presented under high-and low-load conditions. Older adults showed PEs for low-load lists. Whereas PEs disappeared for older-placebo participants for high-load lists, older-glucose participants retained their positive preference. Providing the brain with extra energy resources can help older adults achieve PEs even under demanding conditions.

When faced with a cognitively demanding task, older adults tend to disengage and withdraw effort. At the same time, their usual processing preference for positive information disappears. Providing glucose as an energy resource is known to improve cognitive performance and reinstate older adults' positivity preference. Here, we examined whether glucose can help older adults to exert more effort under high difficulty conditions, and if so, whether such increase is accompanied by a change in positive affect. Fifty-three young and 58 older adults consumed a glucose or a placebo drink and completed a memory-search task at three levels of difficulty. Cognitive engagement was measured through changes in heart rate (HR) and self-reported effort. After each memory-search block, participants completed an implicit emotion-assessment task. In both age groups, glucose produced increased HR (indicating higher task engagement) relative to placebo. In older but not in young adults, glucose also improved cognitive performance and increased positive affect. Subjective effort, in contrast, did not differ between the older-glucose and older-placebo groups. These results suggest that in older adults, glucose improves cognitive performance by promoting higher cognitive engagement while mitigating the subjective costs of effortful exertion. (PsycINFO Database Record