ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES. Socio-emotional selectivity theory implies that an individual’s motives change over their lifespan, starting with a focus on information seeking and shifting toward the motivation of maintaining emotionally meaningful social relationships in old age. The concept of future time perspective serves as an underlying mechanism for this phenomenon. METHODS. This study aimed to capture how social motivation changes as a result of the manipulation of one’s own visual appearance. Thus, the explicit age stereotypes of N = 74 participants were assessed, among other covariates. The following intervention consisted of a virtual reality (VR) scenario in which the experimental group embodied an old age avatar and the control group a young age avatar. RESULTS. Changes in social motivation were assessed using the concept of socio-emotional selectivity based on imagined situational preferences. Results with strong effect sizes indicate that changes in social motivation commonly connected with old age might be caused by visual cues when actively embodying a virtual avatar.

摘要

目标。社会情绪选择性理论意味着个人的动机在其一生中会发生变化，从关注信息寻求开始，然后转向在晚年保持情感上有意义的社会关系的动机。未来时间视角的概念是这种现象的潜在机制。方法。这项研究旨在捕捉社会动机如何因操纵自己的视觉外观而发生变化。因此，N的显式年龄刻板印象= 评估了 74 名参与者，以及其他协变量。以下干预包括一个虚拟现实（VR）场景，其中实验组体现一个老年化身，对照组体现一个年轻化身。结果。使用基于想象的情境偏好的社会情感选择性概念评估社会动机的变化。具有强烈影响大小的结果表明，通常与老年相关的社会动机的变化可能是由积极体现虚拟化身时的视觉线索引起的。