According to a new UCLA study, researchers may have found the reason why older adults are often victims of fraud. The reason may lie in a part of the brain that influences the potential to differentiate among sincere and deceiving faces, says a report in Medical Xpress.
The UCLA life scientists found that a part of brain which is known as anterior insula is linked with differentiating faces which are trustworthy or not, which becomes less active in older adults, according to Medical Xpress report.
"The consequences of misplaced trust for older adults are severe," said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research, which appears Dec. 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "A recent study estimates that adults over age 60 lost at least $2.9 billion in 2010 to financial exploitation, ranging from home repair scams to complex financial swindles. This figure represents a 12 percent increase from 2008.
"Older adults seem to be particularly vulnerable to interpersonal solicitations, and their reduced sensitivity to cues related to trust may partially underlie this vulnerability."
A study conducted by Taylor and her colleagues included 119 older adults aged between 55 and 84 years old and 24 younger adults at a mean age of 23 years were asked to rate 30 photographs of faces. They photographs were shot to look trustworthy, neutral and untrustworthy. As a result younger and older adults reacted almost the same way when looked at trustworthy and neutral faces. But the younger adults reacted strongly while viewing untrustworthy faces while the older adults found those faces trustworthy and friendlier, reported Medical Xpress.
"We wanted to find out whether there are differences in how the brain reacts to these faces, and the answer is yes, there are," Taylor said in a report by Medical Xpress. "We found a strong anterior insula response both to the task of rating trustworthiness and also to the untrustworthy faces among the younger adults-but the response is much more muted among the older adults. The older adults do not have as strong an anterior insula early-warning signal; their brains are not saying 'be wary,' as the brains of the younger adults are.
"In younger adults, the very act of judging whether a person is trustworthy activates the anterior insula," she added. "It's as if they're thinking they need to make this judgment with caution. This gives us a potential brain mechanism for understanding why older and younger adults process facial cues about trust differently. Now we know what the brain sees, and in the older adults, the answer is not very much when it comes to differentiating on the basis of trust."
Although this study did not find significant difference between men and women but it did clarify the cause for older adults being a victim of fraud easily. This study was funded by National Institute on Aging.
