Investigating neurocognitive mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior in adult development

Date

Jan 25, 2018

Time

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Speaker

Andrea Reiter, Julia Stietz

Affiliation

TU Dresden

Series

TUD NIC Kolloquium

Language

en

Main Topic

Psychologie

Other Topics

Psychologie

Description

Understanding others is important for successful aging: it has been linked to life satisfaction, wisdom, and lower degrees of loneliness in old age. In a behavioral study, we have recently demonstrated that sub-facets of the social mind age differentially (Reiter et al., 2017): Components of the socio-cognitive route – Theory of Mind – were impaired in older relative to younger adults. Importantly, the socio-affective route was shown to be well-functioning in old age, with no decline in empathy and elevated compassion in the elderly. Based on these results, we propose a fMRI follow-up study in younger and older adults, where we aim to i) elucidate the associated functional and structural correlates of age-related changes in socio-cognitive vs. socio-affective functions, ii) explore their link to pro-social behavior. These findings might contribute to an integrated theory of age-related change in social functioning.

Links

• Livestream

Last modified: Jan 17, 2018, 5:30:27 PM