@article{ref1,
title="Influences of Age and Emotion on Source Guessing: Are Older Adults More Likely to Show Fear-Relevant Illusory Correlations?",
journal="Journals of gerontology. Series B: psychological sciences and social sciences",
year="2015",
author="Meyer, Miriam Magdalena and Buchner, Axel and Bell, Raoul",
volume="71",
number="5",
pages="831-840",
abstract="OBJECTIVES: The present study investigates age differences in the vulnerability to illusory correlations between fear-relevant stimuli and threatening information. <br><br>METHOD: Younger and older adults saw pictures of threatening snakes and nonthreatening fish, paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information (&quot;poisonous&quot; and &quot;nonpoisonous&quot;) with a null contingency between animal type and poisonousness. In a source monitoring test, participants were required to remember whether an animal was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. Illusory correlations were implicitly measured via a multinomial model. One advantage of this approach is that memory and guessing processes can be assessed independently. An illusory correlation would be reflected in a higher probability of guessing that a snake rather than a fish was poisonous if the poisonousness of the animal was not remembered. <br><br>RESULTS: Older adults showed evidence of illusory correlations in source guessing while younger adults did not; instead they showed evidence of probability matching. Moreover, snake fear was associated with increased vulnerability to illusory correlations in older adults. <br><br>DISCUSSION: The findings confirm that older adults are more susceptible to fear-relevant illusory correlations than younger adults.<p /><p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="1079-5014",
doi="10.1093/geronb/gbv016",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbv016"
}