Objectives: Trust is crucial for successful social interaction across the life span. Perceiver age, facial age, and facial emotion have been shown to influence trustworthiness perception, but the complex interplay between these perceiver and facial characteristics has not been examined. Method: Adopting an adult life-span developmental approach, 199 adults (aged 22–78 years) rated the trustworthiness of faces that systematically varied in age (young, middle-aged, and older) and emotion (neutral, happy, sad, fearful, angry, and disgusted) from the FACES Lifespan Database. Results: The study yielded three key results. First, on an aggregated level, facial trustworthiness perception did not differ by perceiver age. Second, all perceivers rated young faces as the most trustworthy, and middle-aged and older (but not young) perceivers rated older faces as least trustworthy. Third, facial emotions signaling threat (fear, anger, and disgust) relative to neutral, happy, and sad expressions moderated age effects on facial trustworthiness perception. Discussion: Findings from this study highlight the impact of perceiver and facial characteristics on facial trustworthiness perception in adulthood and aging and have potential to inform first impression formation, with effects on trait attributions and behavior. This publication also provides normative data on perceived facial trustworthiness for the FACES Lifespan Database.

Objectives: Older adults are at high risk for complications from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Health guidelines recommend limiting physical contact during the pandemic, drastically reducing opportunities for in-person social exchange. Older adults are also susceptible to negative consequences from loneliness, and the COVID-19 pandemic has likely exacerbated this age-related vulnerability. Methods: In 107 community-dwelling older individuals (65–90 years, 70.5% female) from Florida, the United States, and Ontario, Canada, we examined change in loneliness over the course of the pandemic after implementation of COVID-19-related physical distancing guidelines (March–September 2020; T1–T5; biweekly concurrent self-report) using multilevel modeling. We also explored gender differences in loneliness during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic at both data collection sites. Results: Consistent across the 2 sites, levels of loneliness remained stable over time for the full sample (T1–T5). However, our exploratory moderation analysis suggested gender differences in the trajectory of loneliness between the United States and Canada, in that older men in Florida and older women in Ontario reported an increase in loneliness over time. Discussion: Leveraging a longitudinal, binational data set collected during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study advances understanding of stability and change in loneliness among a North American sample of individuals aged 65 and older faced with the unique challenges of social isolation. These results can inform public health policy in anticipation of future pandemics and highlight the need for targeted intervention to address acute loneliness among older populations.

Difficulties with deception detection may leave older adults especially vulnerable to fraud. Interoception, i.e., the awareness of one’s bodily signals, has been shown to influence deception detection, but this relationship has not been examined in aging yet. The present study investigated effects of interoceptive accuracy on two forms of deception detection: detecting interpersonal lies in videos and identifying text-based deception in phishing emails. Younger (18-34 years) and older (53-82 years) adults completed a heartbeat-detection task to determine interoceptive accuracy. Deception detection was assessed across two distinct, ecologically valid tasks: i) a lie detection task in which participants made veracity judgments of genuine and deceptive individuals, and ii) a phishing email detection task to capture online deception detection. Using multilevel logistic regression models, we determined the effect of interoceptive accuracy on lie and phishing detection in younger versus older adults. In older, but not younger, adults greater interoceptive accuracy was associated with better accuracy in both detecting deceptive people and phishing emails. Interoceptive accuracy was associated with both lie detection and phishing detection accuracy among older adults. Our findings identify interoceptive accuracy as a potential protective factor for fraud susceptibility, as measured through difficulty detecting deception. These results support interoceptive accuracy as a relevant factor for consideration in interventions targeted at fraud prevention among older adults.

While anyone can fall victim to deception with deleterious impact, age-related changes in financial, cognitive, socioemotional, and neurobiological factors convey greater risk to older adults. Neural responses underlying deception detection may elucidate age-related vulnerability or resilience to deception. Here, we examined 53 young (18–33 years) and 50 older (55–78 years) adults who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while aiming to detect deception in naturalistic, high-stakes videos (i.e. pleas for information about a missing relative, where later some of the pleaders were found guilty in the murder of the missing relative). Behaviourally, young and older adults had comparably poor performance at detecting deceptive pleas. Further, we observed a multivariate pattern of brain activity, including visual and parietal areas that differentiated genuine from deceptive pleas across age groups. Reflecting individual variation, older adults with higher sensitivity to deception had stronger activation of brain regions associated with mentalizing (e.g. medial prefrontal cortex) and cognitive control (e.g. anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) during deception detection. Together, our findings build on extant models of decision-making in ageing to show that age differences in brain function may facilitate compensation among some older adults to identify deception.

With technological advancements, financial exploitation tactics have expanded into the online realm. Older adults may be particularly susceptible to online scams due to age- and Alzheimer’s Disease-related changes in cognition. In this study, 182 adults ranging from 18-90 years underwent cognitive assessment, genotyping for apolipoprotein E e4 (APOE4), and completed the lab-based Short Phishing Email Suspicion Test (S-PEST) as well as the real-life PHishing Internet Task (PHIT). Across both paradigms, older age predicted heightened susceptibility to phishing, with this enhanced susceptibility pronounced among older APOE4 allele carriers with lower working memory. Additionally, performance in both phishing tasks was correlated, in that reduced ability to discriminate between phishing and safe emails in S-PEST predicted greater phishing susceptibility in PHIT. The current study introduces S-PEST as an easy-to-administer, ecologically valid tool for assessing phishing susceptibility and identifies older age, APOE4, and lower cognition as risk factors of phishing vulnerability.