The Influence Of Emotional Information On Attention Bias And Decision Making In Young And Old Adults

In our daily life,we are always making all kinds of decisions.Emotions are a very crucial factor influencing decision making.There is no unanimous conclusion about the study of the influence of emotion on decision-making.In the decision-making process,there is a common psychological phenomenon-confidence in decision making,so that people in the same situation will make different decision-making behavior.In the past,most of the research subjects were biased toward college students,but the elderly were more likely to be affected by emotional information.Some studies found that young people and the elderly had different attention bias toward emotional information during the early stages of cognitive processing.However,The direction did not get the same result either.Some study found that attention bias training can improve the emotional state,but pay attention to the impact of biased training on the decision-making needs the support of empirical research.Therefore,this study explore the age difference of emotional information on decision-making,decision-making confidence and attention bias.Then this study explore the impact of attention bias training on the decision-making of the old adults.To solve the above problems,the following three studies were conducted:Experiment 1: Using the frequency estimation paradigm,38 young people(21.15±2.16 years old)and 39 elderly(66.35 ± 6.76 years old)were studied to explore the impact of emotional information on their decision-making and decision-making confidence.The results showed that: 1)The error of frequency estimation of elderly was significantly higher than that of young people,and the relative estimation error of positive information of elderly was significantly higher than that of passive information;2)Confidence of seniors was significantly higher than that of young people,and seniors have more confidence in making decisions on the frequency of positive information,young people have more confidence in making decisions on the frequency of negative messages;3)Positive error in frequencyestimation is positively correlated with decision-making confidence.Experiment 2: An improved version of point detection paradigm was used to investigate the current situation of attention bias of 38 young people(21.15 ± 2.16 years old)and 39elderly(66.35 ± 6.76 years old).The results are as follows: 1)For the young people,the reaction difference between the consistent and inconsistent position was not significant in the positive and negative valence conditions,that is young people do not exist attentional bias;2)For the the elderly,point detection reaction time in the consistent position was significantly greater than that in the inconsistent position in the positive valence condition,namely the elderly show an avoidance of attention to the positive pictures,under the condition of negtive pictures,reaction time was not significantly different between the consistent and inconsistent position;3)subjects' reaction in different emotional picture type was no difference.Experiment 3: Using the experimental group control group design to explore influence of the attention bias training on the decision-making of the elderly 58-72 years old.The results are as follows: 1)By single positive attention bias training,the reaction time of the experimental group in point detection task is significantly lower than that of the control group;2)The relative estimation error of the experimental group is significantly higher than that of the control group,and the relative estimation error of positive information is significantly higher than that of the negative information.The conclusion is that emotional information has influence on both decision-making and decision-making confidence,and there are age differences.Older people are more likely to overestimate the frequency of positive information and decision-making confidence is higher,young people have more confidence in decision-making under the negative information conditions.There is no bias in emotional information for both young and old adults,and it is not affected by the type of emotional information.The single-attention bias training can change the attention bias of the elderly,it makes the old adults' s decision-making standards more risky.instead of improving the accuracy of decision-making.