Joseph A Mikels

DePaul University · Department of Psychology

Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differ...

Divergent trajectories characterize the aging mind: Processing capacity declines, while judgment, knowledge, and emotion regulation are relatively spared. We maintain that these different developmental trajectories have implications for emotion–cognition interactions. Following an overview of our theoretical position, we review empirical studies in...

In contrast to long-held axioms of old age as a time of "doom and gloom," mounting evidence indicates an age-related positivity effect in attention and memory. However, several studies report inconsistent findings that raise critical questions about the effect's reliability, robustness, and potential moderators. To address these questions, we condu...

We are all faced with ambiguous situations daily that we must interpret to make sense of the world. In such situations, do you wear rose-colored glasses and fill in blanks with positives, or do you wear dark glasses and fill in blanks with negatives? In the current study, we presented 32 older and 32 younger adults with a series of ambiguous scenar...

When people ruminate about an unfortunate encounter with a loved one, savor a long-sought accomplishment, or hold in mind feelings from a marvelous or regretfully tragic moment, what mental processes orchestrate these psychological phenomena? Such experiences typify how affect interacts with working memory, which we posit can occur in three primary...

In two studies conducted in 2022, we examined the effect of images that elicit incidental emotions and the timing of exposure to these images, on the maintenance of positive and negative emotions in affective working memory (AWM). In Study 1, participants viewed a negative, positive, or neutral image while maintaining the emotional intensity of pos...

Over the past few decades, the field has garnered a deep and broad understanding of age differences in emotional experience; healthy older adults generally experience a balance of more positive to negative emotions relative to their younger counterparts. But many questions remain, and novel understandings of this general pattern are emerging. This...

Moral judgments and emotional reactions to sociomoral violations are heavily impacted by a perpetrator’s intentions and desires, which pose a threat to social harmony. Given that older adults are more motivated to maintain interpersonal harmony relative to younger adults, older adults may be more reactive to malicious desires. In three studies, we...

Affective Working Memory (AWM) is the ability to maintain an emotion after the emotion-eliciting stimulus is no longer present. Emotions are dynamic, and emotion-eliciting stimuli are encountered simultaneously and sequentially. Therefore, this research aimed to examine AWM when more than one emotion is being maintained. We aimed to re-examine prev...

Strength and vulnerability integration theory (SAVI; Charles, 2010) posits that age differences in emotional experiences vary based on the distance from an emotionally eliciting event. Before and after a stressor, SAVI predicts that older age is related to motivational strivings that often result in higher levels of well-being. During stressor expo...

Strength and vulnerability integration (SAVI) theory (Charles, 2010) posits that age differences in emotional experiences vary based on the distance from an emotionally eliciting event. Before and after a stressor, SAVI predicts that older age is related to motivational strivings that often result in higher levels of well-being. However, during str...

Emotional acceptance is thought to play an important role in protecting mental health. However, few studies have examined emotional acceptance among older adults who may experience declines in functioning, including executive functioning. The present laboratory-based study examined whether emotional acceptance and (to determine specificity) detachm...

Over the past few decades, interest has begun to surge in understanding the role of emotion in decision making, and more recently in studies across the adult life span. Relevant to age-related changes in decision making, theoretical perspectives in judgment and decision making draw critical distinctions between deliberative versus intuitive/affecti...

Despite numerous losses associated with advanced age, older adults typically fare better than their younger counterparts in terms of psychological well-being. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately threatened the physical and mental well-being of older adults. How have older versus younger adults been doing? The goal of our symposium...

Given that older adults value social harmony and selectively avoid negativity (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005), we investigated whether older and younger adults differentially react to scenarios in which someone intends to harm others compared to someone who accidentally harms others. Younger (n = 112, M = 26.23) and older (n = 113, M = 66.42) adults re...

The COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a relentless stressor on the human species with numerous deadly risks. These risks have been disproportionately threatening to the health and wellbeing of older adults. Since April 2020, we have been studying how the pandemic has affected the emotional experiences of older and younger adults broadly in several studie...

How health-related messages are framed can impact their effectiveness in promoting behaviors, and messages framed in terms of gains have been shown to be more effective among older adults. Recent findings have suggested that the affective response to framed messages can contribute to these effects. However, the impact of demands associated with psy...

To advance our understanding of how emotional experience changes across the adult life span, we propose an integrative theoretical framework: the appraisal approach to aging and emotion (AAAE). AAAE posits that (a) age-related cognitive, motivational, and physical changes fundamentally change the appraisal system in certain ways, and that (b) older...

Emotions often guide risk-taking. For example, anger tends to lead to increased risk-taking. However, older and younger adults differ in their emotional experiences: older adults tend to report more positive emotions, fewer experiences of anger, and relatively similar or increased experiences of sadness relative to younger adults. As such, differen...

Framing equivalent information as a gain (e.g., 90% survival rate) or a loss (e.g., 10% mortality rate) can differentially impact judgments and decision making, such that people make more favorable judgements when information is presented as a positive gain versus a negative loss. The current study investigated how framing and age influences evalua...

Background and Objectives Advanced age is generally associated with improved emotional well-being, but the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed a global stressor that gravely threatened the physical well-being and ostensibly challenged the emotional well-being of older adults disproportionately. The current study investigated differences in emotional experi...

Affect can influence judgments and decision-making in multiple ways. One way is through (a) integral affect, or affect related to the choice at hand, and another way is through (b) incidental affect, or affect unrelated to the choice at hand. Research suggests integral affect influences risk-related decision-making, especially in the context of ris...

Background and objectives: Adopting healthy behaviors is often influenced by message framing; gain-framed messages emphasize the benefits of engaging in a behavior, whereas loss-framed messages highlight the consequences of not engaging in a behavior. Research has begun to uncover the underlying affective pathways involved in message framing. In t...

Affective forecasting (AF), the ability to predict one’s future feelings, is important for decision making. We posit that AF entails the ability to maintain and evaluate an emotional feeling state, and thus requires affective working memory (AWM; Mikels & Reuter-Lorenz, 2019). To test this hypothesis, a series of studies investigated whether indivi...

Background and Objectives: Increasing exercise continues to be an important health issue for both older and younger adults. Researchers have suggested several methods for increasing exercise motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that people’s motivation shift from future-oriented instrumental goals to present-oriented emotional...

Evidence suggests that older adults experience greater emotional well-being compared to younger adults. Appraisal theories of emotion posit that differences in emotional experience are the result of differences in appraisal. As such, age differences in appraisal may relate to age differences in emotion. To investigate this, the present study focuse...

Background: Health-related messages, framed in terms of gains or losses, can impact decision-making differently across the adult life span. The focus of this study was on the emotional responses evoked by such framing and their relationship to perceived effectiveness, as mechanisms that may underpin how health messages impact health decisions. Meth...

The adult life span is characterized as a time of divergent trajectories. It is a time of compounding losses (such as physical, sensory, and cognitive declines) and is also a time of surprising growth (such as improvements in well-being and emotion regulation). These divergent trajectories present theorists with the paradox of aging: in the face of...

When faced with a decision, certain aspects of the decision itself shape our affective responses to choice options, which, in turn, influence our choices. These integral affective influences manifest as immediate feelings about choice options as well as the feelings that we anticipate we will feel after certain potential outcomes. We examined wheth...

Background and objectives: Increasing exercise continues to be an important health issue for both older and younger adults. Researchers have suggested several methods for increasing exercise motivation. Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) posits that people's motivation shift from future-oriented instrumental goals to present-oriented emotiona...

Research on adult age differences in the interpretation of facial expressions has yet to examine evaluations of surprised faces, which signal that an unexpected and ambiguous event has occurred in the expresser’s environment. The present study examined whether older and younger adults differed in their interpretations of the affective valence of su...

Age differences in responses to framed health messages-which can influence judgments and decisions-are critical to understand yet relatively unexplored. Age-related emotional shifts toward positivity would be expected to differentially impact the affective responses of older and younger adults to framed messages. In this study, we measured the subj...

To best understand the role of emotion in decision-making across the adult life span, it is imperative to have a thorough grounding in judgment and decision making theoretical perspectives. Thus, we provide an overview of theoretical perspectives that emphasize the role of emotion in decision making including dual-process models, cognitive-experien...

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 that goal-directed behavior requires attentional control, the present study was designed to in...

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults prefer less autonomy and seek less information when making decisions on their own relative to young adults (for a review, see M. Mather, 2006). Would older adults also prefer fewer options from which to choose? The authors tested this hypothesis in the context of different decision domains. Parti...

Across a variety of decision domains, older adults were found to desire fewer choice options than younger adults, but the age trajectory and underlying mechanisms of these effects remain unknown. The present study examined the pattern and correlates of age differences in choice set size preferences using self-report and behavioral measures. Self-re...

Research on aging has indicated that whereas deliberative cognitive processes decline with age, emotional processes are relatively spared. To examine the implications of these divergent trajectories in the context of health care choices, we investigated whether instructional manipulations emphasizing a focus on feelings or details would have differ...

This chapter describes the cognitive steps that consumers need to go through to makewise conventional and reverse mortgage decisions with the aim of educating mortgagecounselors about these steps and to develop strategies so counselors can more effectivelyhelp lead consumers through them. These cognitive steps include: (1) learning about andunderst...

When making decisions, people typically draw on two general modes of thought: intuition and reason. Age-related changes in cognition and emotion may impact these decision processes: Although older individuals experience declines in deliberative processes, they experience stability or improvement in their emotional processes. Recent research has sho...

Bipolar disorder is a disorder of emotion regulation. Less is known, however, about the specific processes that foster the maintenance of such prolonged and intense emotions-particularly positive-over time in this disorder. We investigated group-related differences in the ability to maintain positive and negative emotion representations over time u...

Previous research on the role of choice set size in decision making has focused on decision outcomes and satisfaction. In contrast, little is known about interindividual differences in preferences for larger versus smaller choice sets, let alone the causes of such differences. Drawing on self-efficacy theory, two studies examined the role of decisi...

Research on working memory has suggested domain-specific components for visual, verbal, and spatial information, and more recently for emotion. Affective working memory has been proposed as the set of processes involved in the maintenance of emotions to guide behaviour. The current study examined the reliability of an emotion maintenance/affective...

Deliberative decision strategies have historically been considered the surest path to sound decisions; however, recent evidence and theory suggest that affective strategies may be equally as effective. In four experiments we examined conditions under which affective versus deliberative decision strategies might result in higher decision quality. Wh...

Engagement in risky behavior has traditionally been attributed to an underestimation of the associated risks, but recent perspectives suggest that affective reactions toward a risky option may better explain risk-seeking than risk perception. However, the precise relationship between emotion and risk-seeking remains unclear. The current set of stud...

Although valenced health care messages influence impressions, memory, and behavior (Levin, Schneider, & Gaeth, 1998) and the processing of valenced information changes with age (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005), these 2 lines of research have thus far been disconnected. This study examined impressions of, and memory for, positively and negatively framed...

Reports an error in "Following your heart or your head: Focusing on emotions versus information differentially influences the decisions of younger and older adults" by Joseph A. Mikels, Corinna E. Löckenhoff, Sam J. Maglio, Laura L. Carstensen, Mary K. Goldstein and Alan Garber (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2010[Mar], Vol 16[1], 87-...

The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been. —Madeline L’Engle at age 65 when speaking with a fourth grader who asked, “How old are you?” Aging appears to be associated with a growing preference for positive over negative information (Carstensen, Mikels, & Mather, 2006). In this study, we investigated p...

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 that goal-directed behavior requires attentional control, the present study was designed to in...

Studies of the framing effect indicate that individuals are risk averse for decisions framed as gains but risk seeking for decisions framed as losses. However, findings regarding age-related changes in susceptibility to framing are mixed. Recent work demonstrating age-related decreases in reactivity to anticipated monetary losses, but not gains, su...

Happiness-a composite of life satisfaction, coping resources, and positive emotions-predicts desirable life outcomes in many domains. The broaden-and-build theory suggests that this is because positive emotions help people build lasting resources. To test this hypothesis, the authors measured emotions daily for 1 month in a sample of students (N =...

Choice is highly valued in modern society, from the supermarket to the hospital; however, it remains unknown whether older and younger adults place the same value on increased choice. The current investigation tested whether 53 older (M age = 75.44 years) versus 53 younger adults (M age = 19.58 years) placed lower value on increased choice by exami...

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults prefer less autonomy and seek less information when making decisions on their own relative to young adults (for a review, see M. Mather, 2006). Would older adults also prefer fewer options from which to choose? The authors tested this hypothesis in the context of different decision domains. Parti...

Working memory is comprised of separable subsystems for visual and verbal information, but what if the information is affective? Does the maintenance of affective information rely on the same processes that maintain nonaffective information? The authors address this question using a novel delayed-response task developed to investigate the short-ter...

The experience of mixed emotions increases with age. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that mixed emotions are associated with shifting time horizons. Theoretically, perceived constraints on future time increase appreciation for life, which, in turn, elicits positive emotions such as happiness. Yet, the very same temporal constraints heigh...

The Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) are a commonly used set of 1034 words characterized on the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Traditionally, studies of affect have used stimuli characterized along either affective dimensions or discrete emotional categories, but much current research draws on both of these perspec...

As in the mainstream of psychology, the field of psychology and aging has been parsed into subareas according to topical focus. Cognitive psychology concerns processing capacity, memory, and knowledge. Social and personality psychology address socioemotional aspects of aging, such as well-being and self-regulation. Historically, these subareas have...

Although aging is broadly characterized by decline, the potential for new learning and plasticity persists well into the later decades of life. Scientific advances are yielding a deeper understanding of the limitations that biological aging imposes on cognitive function, as well as new insights into how the human mind and brain respond adaptively t...

Sociality may determine the subjective experience and physiological response to emotional stimuli. Film segments induced socially and nonsocially generated emotions. Comedy (social positive), bereavement (social negative), pizza scenes (nonsocial positive), and wounded bodies (nonsocial negative) elicited four distinct emotional patterns. Per subje...

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 discrete emotions, the categorical structure of the IAPS has not been characterized thoroughly. Th...

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 working memory for these types of information, recent findings suggestive of relatively well-preser...

Prior studies on the association between weather and psychological changes have produced mixed results. In part, this inconsistency may be because weather's psychological effects are moderated by two important factors: the season and time spent outside. In two correlational studies and an experiment manipulating participants' time outdoors (total N...

It has been proposed that features of Alzheimer-type dementia (AD) reflect a breakdown in cortical connectivity that can be likened to a disconnection syndrome. One hypothesized consequence of this pathology is that AD patients should be disproportionally impaired on measures of interhemispheric transfer. However, there is a paucity of studies bear...

The present study presents normative measures for 260 line drawings of everyday objects, found in Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), viewed by individuals in China and the United States. Within each cultural group, name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity measures were obtained separately for younger adults and older adults. For a subset of...

The corpus callosum has been proposed to contribute to attention by modulating resource allocation between the hemispheres and filtering interhemispheric signal transmission (M. T. Banich, 1998). The resource allocation hypothesis predicts that interhemispheric interactions become more advantageous with increasing resource demands. The selective fi...

Age differences in frontal and hippocampal activations in working memory were investigated during a maintenance and subsequent probe interval in an event-related fMRI design. Younger and older adults either viewed or maintained photographs of real-world scenes (extended visual or maintenance conditions) over a 4-sec interval before responding to a...

There are substantial declines in behavioral measures of cognitive function with age, including decreased function of executive processes and long-term memory. There is also evidence that, with age, there is a decrease in brain volume, particularly in the frontal cortex. When young and older adults perform cognitive tasks that depend heavily on fro...

This manual accompanies Stevenson et al. (2007), and references data archived at www.psychonomics.com. Included in the referenced Excel file are three spreadsheets, one including data describing results from all subjects, the second describing results from female only, and the third from only males. All Subjects This tab includes data from both mal...