Seeing the glass as half full: Taking a new look at cognition and aging 11-12

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library

From a cognitive perspective, aging is typically associated with decline. As we age, it may get harder to remember names and dates, and it may take us longer to come up with the right answer to a question.

But the news isn’t all bad when it comes to cognitive aging, according to a set of three articles in the July 2014 issue of Perspectives in Psychological Science.

Plumbing the depths of the available scientific literature, the authors of the three articles show how several factors — including motivation and crystallized knowledge — can play important roles in supporting and maintaining cognitive function in the decades past middle age.

Motivation Matters

Lab data offer evidence of age-related declines in cognitive function, but many older adults appear to function quite well in their everyday lives. Psychological scientist Thomas Hess of North Carolina State University sets forth a motivational framework of “selective engagement” to explain this apparent contradiction.

If the cognitive cost of engaging in difficult tasks increases as we age, older adults may be less motivated to expend limited cognitive resources on difficult tasks or on tasks that are not personally relevant to them. This selectivity, Hess argues, may allow older adults to improve performance on the tasks they do choose to engage in, thereby helping to account for inconsistencies between lab-based and real-world data.

Prior Knowledge Brings Both Costs and Benefits

Episodic memory – memory for the events of our day-to-day lives – seems to decline with age, while memory for general knowledge does not. Researchers Sharda Umanath and Elizabeth Marsh of Duke University review evidence suggesting that older adults use prior knowledge to fill in gaps caused by failures of episodic memory, in ways that can both hurt and help overall cognitive performance. While reliance on prior knowledge can make it difficult to inhibit past information when learning new information, it can also make older adults more resistant to learning new erroneous information.

According to Umanath and Marsh, future research should focus on better understanding this compensatory mechanism and whether it can be harnessed in developing cognitive interventions and tools.

Older Adults Aren’t Necessarily Besieged By Fraud

Popular writers and academics alike often argue that older adults, due to certain cognitive differences, are especially susceptible to consumer fraud. Psychological scientists Michael Ross, Igor Grossmann, and Emily Schryer of the University of Waterloo in Canada review the available data to examine whether incidences of consumer fraud are actually higher among older adults. While there isn’t much research that directly answers this question, the research that does exist suggests that older adults may be less frequent victims than other age groups.

Ross, Grossmann, and Schryer find no evidence that older adults are actually more vulnerable to fraud, and they argue that anti-fraud policies should be aimed at protecting consumers of all ages.

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Gut Branches of Vagus Nerve Essential Components of Brain’s Reward and Motivation System 09-27

Summary: Researchers report a gut-brain neural circuit establishes the vagus nerve as an essential component of the brain system that regulates reward and motivation. 

A novel gut-to-brain neural circuit establishes the vagus nerve as an essential component of the brain system that regulates reward and motivation, according to research conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published September 20 in the journal Cell. The study provides a concrete link between visceral organs and brain function, especially in regards to reward, and may help to inform novel targets for vagal stimulation therapy, particularly for eating and emotional disorders.

Previous research established the gut as a major regulator of motivational and emotional states but until now, the relevant gut-brain neuronal circuitry remained elusive. The vagus nerve, the longest of the cranial nerves, contains motor and sensory fibers and passes through the neck and thorax to the abdomen. Traditionally, scientists believed that the nerve exclusively mediated suppressive functions such as fullness and nausea; in contrast, circulating hormones, rather than vagal transmission, were thought to convey reward signals from the gut to the brain.

“Our study reveals, for the first time, the existence of a neuronal population of ‘reward neurons’ amid the sensory cells of the right branch of the vagus nerve,” says Ivan de Araujo, DPhil, Senior Faculty in the Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and senior author of the paper. “We focused on challenging the traditional view that the vagus nerve is unrelated to motivation and pleasure and we found that stimulation of the nerve, specifically its upper gut branch, is sufficient to strongly excite reward neurons lying deep inside the brain.”

The branches of the vagus nerve are intricately intermingled, making it extremely difficult to manipulate each organ separately. To address this challenge, the research team employed a combination of virally delivered molecular tools that allowed them to exclusively target the vagal sensory neurons connected to the stomach and upper intestine.

Specifically, researchers combined different viruses carrying molecular tools in a way that allowed them to optically activate vagal neurons connected to the gut while vagal neurons leading to other organs remained mute. The approach, a state-of-the-art technique known as “optogenetics,” allows investigators to use light to manipulate the activity of a prespecified set of neurons. 

The study revealed that the newly identified reward neurons of the right vagus nerve operate under the same constraints attributed to reward neurons of the central nervous system, meaning they link peripheral sensory cells to the previously mapped populations of reward neurons in the brain. Strikingly, neurons of the left vagus were associated with satiety, but not with reward. The research team’s anatomical studies also revealed, for the first time, that the right and left vagal branches ascend asymmetrically into the central nervous system.

“We were surprised to learn that only the right vagal branch eventually contacts the dopamine-containing reward neurons in the brainstem,” explained Wenfei Han, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and lead author of the study. Dopamine is a neural transmitter known to be essential for reward and motivation. 

The uncovering of right gastrointestinal vagal neurons as conveyors of reward signals to the brain opens opportunities for novel, more specific stimulation targets that may increase the efficacy of vagal nerve stimulation therapy, a treatment that involves delivering electrical impulses to the vagus nerve, for patients suffering from emotional and eating disorders. 

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The 3 Types of Diversity That Shape Our Identities.06-03

Diversity means different things to different people. In a study of 180 Spanish corporate managers, we explored perceptions of diversity and found that depending on who is answering, diversity usually means one of three things: demographic diversity (our gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on), experiential diversity (our affinities, hobbies, and abilities), and cognitive diversity (how we approach problems and think about things). All three types shape identity — or rather, identities.

Demographic diversity is tied to our identities of origin — characteristics that classify us at birth and that we will carry around for the rest of our lives. Experiential diversity is based on life experiences that shape our emotional universe. Affinity bonds us to people with whom we share some of our likes and dislikes, building emotional communities. Experiential diversity influences we might call identities of growth. Cognitive diversity makes us look for other minds to complement our thinking: what we might call identities of aspiration.

It is important to remember that categories only serve the purpose of classification; in the real world, differences between these categories are blurred. Diversity is dynamic. But we believe this diversity framework, though somewhat artificial (as all frameworks are) can be useful to companies who are trying to refresh their approach to managing diversity. What kind of diversity does your company focus on? Could you benefit from broadening your perspective? Let’s take a closer look at each in turn.

Managing identities of origin. Since the 1980s, most global companies have developed diversity and inclusion policies led by human resources. The most frequent include: assessment tools (climate surveys, statistics monitoring, minority targets), human resources programs (flexible policies, mentoring or coaching), communication campaigns, and training programs.

Consider Sodexho. In 2002 the company hired a chief diversity officer, Anand Rohini, to make diversity a priority. Some of the diversity priorities at Sodexho focused on gender, ethnicity, disabilities, and age. Its diversity strategy included a series of systems and processes covering human resources policies (such as flexibility measures, training, selection processes and career services); diversity scorecards; and quantitative targets, mainly regarding numbers of women and minorities, not only in the organization in general but also in leadership positions. By 2005 Sodexho was widely recognized as a diversity champion. For more than a decade it has been consistently ranked among the best of the DiversityInc top 50 list, and Anand Rohini has been widely recognized as a global diversity champion.

For Sodexho and other companies taking a similar approach, the result is an enhanced company image and reputation. Talented individuals in general, but from minorities in particular, select companies in which they expect to feel appreciated.

Managing identities of growth. Identities of growth often provide us with a feeling of security. Our likes and dislikes change over time, and so our affinity groups change. Identities of growth dictate who we spend time with.

Many companies have developed friendship-based communities among employees, typically organizing activities such as weekends away, departmental Christmas parties, and so on, in a bid to create emotional ties between workers and the company. But because emotional communities are held together as much by the likes as by the dislikes of members, they can be unpredictable and difficult to manage in the long term. As a result, these emotional communities can sometimes work to the benefit of organizations, but they can just as often end up having the opposite effect, particularly when people share a dislike for certain policies, a particular boss, or for what they consider to be an unfair situation.

Our research suggests that the best policy for dealing with communities of growth is through minimum intervention. Emotional communities will emerge in organizations, whether management likes it or not, and will have a life of their own. For that reason it is best to take a neutral position. Creating affinity groups is positive for the company. But these groups should always be voluntary and develop at their own pace, without management interference.

Managing identities of aspiration. Our cognitive differences find their place in a community of aspiration. In those communities, we are valued for our unique way of understanding and interpreting the world. A community of aspiration is a space where our ideas are valued for their contribution to a common project, regardless of our different traits or individual likes or dislikes.

Innovative organizations are shifting from managing units to managing challenges or projects, asking employees to voluntarily join projects, creating structures where employees can move out of their comfort zones to join temporary communities of aspiration that strengthen cross-organizational ties and help the company achieve its strategic goals.

Corporate experience shows that the most effective strategy for companies to manage communities of aspiration is to create the contexts and the projects for them to emerge.

Valve Corporation, a video game developer, has defined a unique corporate structure with no bosses or managers at all. Each member of the company is invited to define their contribution to the company according to their choices and preferences. A highly talented developer specialized in graphics animation might choose to work on a game by assuming a “group contributor role,” becoming part of the group developing that game.

After finishing this “group contribution,” the same person might choose to work in a more individualistic fashion on the next task. This “free to choose” approach is mirrored in the firm’s office design. Valve offices incorporate wheeled desks to foster mobility and allow the fast configuration and reconfiguration of groups as well as individual work.

Understanding multiple types of diversity is particularly relevant in our tribal times. Individuals now construct identities consciously. We want to play with a multiplicity of identities and use them in as many different roles as their different affiliations allow.

We live in complex times, when complex solutions are need it and where a one solution for all approach no longer works. Each form of diversity is different and requires its own management strategy to effectively integrate people. Diversity is a journey and, like any journey, requires careful navigation.

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This is the relationship between money and happiness 04-25

Can money buy you happiness? 

It’s a longstanding question that has many different answers, depending on who you ask.

Today’s chart approaches this fundamental question from a data-driven perspective, and it provides one potential solution: money does buy some happiness, but only to a limited extent.

Money and happiness

First, a thinking exercise.

Let’s say you have two hypothetical people: one of them is named Beff Jezos and he’s a billionaire, and the other is named Jill Smith and she has a more average net worth. Who do you think would be happiest if their wealth was instantly doubled?

Beff might be happy that he’s got more in the bank, but materially his life is unlikely to change much – after all, he’s a billionaire. On the flipside, Jill also has more in the bank and is likely able to use those additional resources to provide better opportunities for her family, get out of debt, or improve her work-life balance.

These resources translate to real changes for Jill, potentially increasing her level of satisfaction with life.

Just like these hypotheticals, the data tells a similar story when we look at countries.

The data-driven approach

World Bank

In general, this means that as a country’s wealth increases from $10k to $20k per person, it will likely slide up the happiness scale as well. For a double from $30k to $60k, the relationship still holds – but it tends to have far more variance. This variance is where things get interesting.

Outlier regions

Some of the most obvious outliers can be found in Latin America and the Middle East:

In Latin America, people self-report that they are more satisfied than the trend between money and happiness would predict.

Costa Rica stands out in particular here, with a GDP per capita of $15,400 and a 7.14 rating on the Cantril Ladder (which is a measure of happiness). Whether it’s the country’s rugged coastlines or the local culture that does the trick, Costa Rica has higher happiness ratings than the U.S., Belgium, or Germany – all countries with far higher levels of wealth.

In the Middle East, the situation is mostly reversed. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, and the U.A.E. are all on the other side of the trend line.

Outlier countries

Within regions, there is even plenty of variance.

We just mentioned the Middle East as a place where the wealth-happiness continuum doesn’t seem to hold up as well as it does in other places in the world.

Interestingly, in Qatar, which is actually the wealthiest country in the world on a per capita basis ($127k), things are even more out of whack. Qatar only scores a 6.37 on the Cantril Ladder, making it a big exception even within the context of the already-outlying Middle East. 

Nearby Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., and Oman are all poorer than Qatar per capita, yet they are happier places. Oman rates a 6.85 on the satisfaction scale, with less than one-third the wealth per capita of Qatar.

There are other outlier jurisdictions on the list as well: Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan are all significantly happier than the trend line (or their regional location) would project. Meanwhile, places like Hong Kong, Ireland, Singapore, and Luxembourg are less happy than wealth would predict.

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How to Get People Addicted to a Good Habit 02-16

Researchers set out to discover whether they could induce households to develop a healthy habit of handwashing with soap. Here a young boy in West Bengal, India, uses a wall-mounted soap dispenser provided by the research team. (Source: Reshmann Hussam)

Reshmaan Hussam and colleagues used experimental interventions to determine if people could be persuaded to develop a healthy habit. Potentially at stake: the lives of more than a million children.

A few years ago, Reshmaan Hussam and colleagues decided to find out why many people in the developing world fail to wash their hands with soap, despite lifesaving benefits.

Every year more than a million children under the age of five die from diarrheal diseases and pneumonia. Washing hands with soap before meals can dramatically reduce rates of both diarrhea and acute respiratory infections.

To that end, major health organizations have poured a lot of money into handwashing education campaigns in the developing world, but to little avail. Even when made aware of the importance of a simple activity, and even when provided with free supplies, people continue to wash their hands without soap—if they wash their hands at all.

“If you look at these public health initiatives, you see that they are often a complicated combination of interventions: songs and dances and plays and free soap and water dispensers,” says Hussam, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School whose research lies at the intersection of development, behavioral, and health economics. “Which means that when these initiatives don’t work, nobody can say why.”

When Hussam and her fellow researchers conducted their initial survey of several thousand rural households in West Bengal, India, they discovered that people don’t wash their hands with soap for the same reason most of us don’t run three miles every morning or drink eight glasses of water every day, despite our doctors lecturing us on the benefits of cardiovascular exercise and hydration. It’s not that we are uninformed, unable, or lazy. It’s that we’re just not in the habit.

“The idea is that habits are equivalent to addictions”

With that in mind, the researchers designed a field study to understand whether handwashing with soap was indeed a habit-forming behavior, whether people recognized it as such, whether it was possible to induce the habit with experimental interventions, and whether the habit would continue after the interventions ceased.

The field experiment was based on the theory of “rational addiction.” Developed by economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy, the theory posits that addictions are not necessarily irrational. Rather, people often willingly engage in a particular behavior, despite knowing that it will increase their desire to engage in that behavior in the future (i.e. become “addicted”). As “rational addicts,” people can weigh the costs and benefits of their current behavior taking into consideration its implications for the future, and still choose to engage.

One way to test whether people are in fact “rational” about their addictions, Hussam says,is by looking at how changes in the future cost of the behavior affect them today. For example, if a rational addict learns that taxes on cigarettes are going to double in six months, she may be less likely to take up smoking today.

Hussam remains agnostic on whether the behavior of addicts (to cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol, for example) can be fully understood by the theory of rational addiction—“a theory that fails to explain why addicts often regret their behavior or regard it as a mistake,” she says. But she found the framework, which has historically been applied only to harmful behaviors, was useful to shift into the language of positive habits.

“Habits, after all, are like a lesser form of addiction: The more you engage in the past, the more likely you are to engage today,” she says. “And if that’s the case, do people recognize—are they ’rational’ about—the habitual nature of good behaviors? If they aren’t, it could explain the underinvestment in behaviors like handwashing with soap that we see. If they are rational, it can affect the design of interventions and incentives that policymakers can offer to encourage positive habit formation.”

The team’s experiment and findings are detailed in the paper Habit Formation and Rational Addiction: A Field Experiment in Handwashing (pdf), authored by Hussam; Atonu Rabbani, an associate professor at the University of Dhaka; Giovanni Reggiani, then a doctoral student at MIT and now a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group; and Natalia Rigol, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The hand washing experiment

In partnership with engineers at the MIT Media Lab, the researchers designed a simple wall-mounted soap dispenser with a time-stamped sensor hidden inside. The sensor allowed the team to determine not only how often people were washing their hands, but also whether they were doing so before dinnertime, critical to an effective intervention. (The idea for the hidden sensors came from a scene in Jurassic World in which one of the characters smuggles dinosaur embryos in a jury-rigged can of Barbasol shaving cream.) The data gave the researchers the ability to tease apart behavioral mechanisms in a way that earlier work (which often used self-reports or surveyor observations of hand hygiene) could not do.

The researchers were also mindful about which type of soap to use in the dispensers. Through pilot tests, they found that people preferred foam, for example. “They didn’t feel as clean when the soap wasn’t foamy,” Hussam says.

And because all people in the experiment ate meals with their hands, they were turned off by heavily perfumed soap, which interfered with the taste of their food. So the experiment avoided strongly scented soap. That said, “we preserved some scent, as the olfactory system is a powerful sensory source of both memory and pleasure and thus easily embedded into the habit loop,” the researchers explain in the paper.

The experiment included 3,763 young children and their parents in 2,943 households across 105 villages in the Birbhum District of West Bengal, where women traditionally manage both cooking and childcare. A survey showed that 79 percent of mothers in the sample could articulate, without being prompted, that the purpose of soap is to kill germs.

But while more than 96 percent reported rinsing their hands with water before cooking and eating, only 8 percent said they used soap before cooking and only 14 percent before eating. (Hussam contends that these low numbers are almost certainly overestimates, as they were self-reported.) Some 57 percent of the respondents reported that they didn’t wash their hands with soap simply because “Obhyash nai,” which means “I do not have the habit,” Hussam says.

Monitoring vs. offering incentives

The researchers randomly divided the villages into “monitoring” and “incentive” villages, taking two approaches to inducing the hand washing habit. In each experiment, there was a randomly selected control group of households that did not receive a soap dispenser; altogether, 1,400 of the 2,943 households received dispensers.

“The monitoring experiment tried to understand the beginnings of social norm formation: whether third-party observation through active tracking by surveyors of hand washing behavior could increase hand washing rates, and whether the behavior could become a habit even after the monitoring stopped,” Hussam explains.

Among the 1,400 households that received a soap dispenser, one group was told their hand washing would be tracked from the get-go, and that they would receive feedback reports on their soap usage patterns. Another group was told their behavior would be tracked in a few months, enabling a precise test of rational habit formation—whether people would start washing their hands now if they knew that the “value” of hand washing would increase in the future. And another group was not told that soap use would be tracked.

The incentive experiment “tried to price a household’s value of hand washing and forward-looking behavior,” Hussam says—in other words, whether financial incentives could increase hand washing rates, and whether those households would keep using soap even after the incentives stopped. In one incentive group, people learned that they would receive one ticket for each day they washed their hands; the tickets could be accumulated and cashed in for various goods and gifts in a prize catalog.

In another group, people learned that they initially would receive one ticket each day for washing their hands with soap, but that in two months they would begin receiving triple the number of tickets for every day they used the dispenser. The final group received the same incentive boost two months into the experiment, but it was a happy surprise: The group had no prior knowledge of the triple-ticket future.

“The difference … is a measure of rational habit formation,” Hussam explains. “While one household is anticipating a change in future value of the behavior, the other household is not; if the first household behaves differently than their counterpart in the present, they must recognize that handwashing today increases their own likelihood of handwashing in the future.”

A clean victory

The results showed that both monitoring and monetary incentives led to substantial increases in hand washing with soap.

Households were 23 percent more likely to use soap if they knew they were being monitored. And some 70 percent of ticket-receiving households used their soap dispensers regularly throughout the experiment, compared with 30 percent of households that received the dispensers without incentives.
Importantly, the effects continued even after the households stopped receiving tickets and monitoring reports, suggesting that handwashing with soap was indeed a developable habit.

More importantly, the experiment resulted in healthier children in households that received a soap dispenser, with a 20 percent decrease in acute respiratory infections and a 30 to 40 percent decrease in loose stools on any given day, compared with children whose households did not have soap dispensers. Moreover, the children with soap dispensers ended up weighing more and even growing taller. “For an intervention of only eight months, that really surprised us,” Hussam says.

But while it appeared that handwashing was indeed a habitual behavior, were people “rational” about it? Indeed they were, based on the results of the monitoring experiment.

“Our results are consistent with the key predictions of the rational addiction model, expanding its relevance to settings beyond what are usually considered ‘addictive’ behaviors,” the researchers write.

In the incentives group, the promise of triple tickets didn’t affect behavior much, but, as Hussam notes, that may have been because the single tickets were already enough to get the children their most coveted prize: a school backpack. “Basically, we found that getting one ticket versus getting no tickets had huge effects, while going from one to three did little,” she says.

“Wherever we go, habits define much of what we do”

But in the monitoring group, handwashing rates increased significantly and immediately, not only for those who were monitored but also for those who were simply told to anticipate that their behavior would be tracked at a later date. “Simply knowing that handwashing will be more valuable in the future (because your behavior will be tracked so there’s a higher cost to shirking) makes people wash more today,” Hussam says.

This, Hussam hopes, is the primary takeaway of the study. While the experiment focused on a specific behavior in/among a specific area of India, the findings may prove valuable to anyone who is trying to develop a healthy addiction—whether it be an addiction to treating contaminated drinking water and using mosquito nets in the developing world, or an addiction to exercising every day and flossing every night in the developed world.

“Wherever we go, habits define much of what we do,” Hussam says. “This work can help us understand how to design interventions that help us cultivate the good ones.” 

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