Motivation and social-cognitive abilities in older adults: Convergent evidence from self-report measures and cardiovascular reactivity

Abstract

Recently, some authors have suggested that age-related impairments in social-cognitive abilities—emotion recognition (ER) and theory of mind (ToM)—may be explained in terms of reduced motivation and effort mobilization in older adults. We examined performance on ER and ToM tasks, as well as corresponding control tasks, experimentally manipulating self-involvement. Sixty-one older adults and 57 young adults were randomly assigned to either a High or Low self-involvement condition. In the first condition, self-involvement was raised by telling participants were told that good task performance was associated with a number of positive, personally relevant social outcomes. Motivation was measured with both subjective (self-report questionnaire) and objective (systolic blood pressure reactivity—SBP-R) indices. Results showed that the self-involvement manipulation did not increase self-reported motivation, SBP-R, or task performance. Further correlation analyses focusing on individual differences in motivation did not reveal any association with performance, in either young or older adults. Notably, we found age-related decline in both ER and ToM, despite older adults having higher motivation than young adults. Overall, the present results were not consistent with previous claims that motivation affects older adults’ social-cognitive performance, opening the route to potential alternative explanations.

Association between ambulatory blood pressure variability and frailty among older hypertensive patients

“…In this study, ordinal logistic regression analysis showed that 24‐hour, daytime and nighttime systolic ARV and CV, but not diastolic parameters, were independently associated with frailty. A possible explanation for this may be that sympathetic nervous system is an important regulator of short‐term blood pressure, 45 in particular, systolic blood pressure reflects sympathetic nervous system activation 46 . However, it has been suggested that the sympathetic nervous activity was decreased in older adults with frailty 47 .…”

Reviewing the potentials of Mobile Media and Learning

“…The review of literature indicates that adult learners tend to show lower levels of engagement in pedagogical activities, as they also cautiously select where to put effort into such activities, and they have their own personal learning goals. Based on these classifications, I argue that independent learners' engagement is overly affected by the perceived importance of the motivational aspect (Ceccato et al, 2019). Kubota (2011) suggests that the learning of a language and the personal and social world of the learner are co-dependent.…”

They Cannot, They Will Not, or We Are Asking the Wrong Questions: Re-examining Age-Related Decline in Social Cognition

“…Evidence shows how explicitly motivating performance goals increases older adults’ performance. Indeed, age differences in emotion recognition and person perception disappear entirely when people are told that they will need to justify their judgments after completing the task ( Hess et al, 2001 , 2009a , b ; Stanley and Isaacowitz, 2015 ), despite the fact that self-rated motivation does not influence emotion recognition ( Ceccato et al, 2019 ). Thus, evidence of age-related decline in social cognition may be an artifact of older adults’ implicit resource preservation goals which leads to worse performance, especially when there are no consequences for being wrong.…”