Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy.
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec, Canada, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2019 Jul 10;14(7):e0218785. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0218785. eCollection 2019.
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.
最近，一些作者认为，与年龄相关的社会认知能力（情绪识别和心理理论）受损可以用老年人的动机和努力调动减少来解释。我们通过实验操纵自我卷入，考察了情绪识别和心理理论任务以及相应的控制任务的表现。61 名老年人和 57 名年轻人被随机分配到高自我卷入或低自我卷入条件下。在第一种情况下，通过告诉参与者良好的任务表现与一些积极的、与个人相关的社会结果有关，从而提高自我卷入。动机通过主观（自我报告问卷）和客观（收缩压反应性-SBP-R）指标来衡量。结果表明，自我卷入的操纵并没有增加自我报告的动机、SBP-R 或任务表现。进一步关注年轻人和老年人的动机个体差异的相关分析表明，动机与表现之间没有任何关联。值得注意的是，尽管老年人的动机比年轻人高，但我们发现他们的情绪识别和心理理论都存在与年龄相关的衰退。总体而言，这些结果与先前关于动机影响老年人社会认知表现的说法不一致，为潜在的替代解释开辟了道路。
