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In social interaction, age-related differences in emotional processing may lead to varied social decision making between young and older adults. However, previous studies of social decision making have paid less attention to the interactants' emotions, leaving age differences and underlying neural mechanisms unexplored. To address this gap, the present study combined functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging, employing a modified dictator game task with recipients displaying either neutral or sad facial expressions. Behavioral results indicated that although older adults' overall allocations did not differ significantly from those of young adults, older adults' allocations showing a decrease in emotion-related generosity compared to young adults. Using representational similarity analysis, we found that older adults showed reduced neural representations of recipients' emotions and gray matter volume in the right anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC), right insula, and left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) compared to young adults. More importantly, mediation analyses indicated that age influenced allocations not only through serial mediation of neural representations of the right insula and left DMPFC, but also through serial mediation of the mean gray matter volume of the right ACC and left DMPFC. This study identifies the potential neural pathways through which age affects emotion-related social decision making, advancing our understanding of older adults' social interaction behavior that they may not be less generous unless confronted with individuals with specific emotions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare no conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Previous studies have shown that aging is associated with changes in decision behavior. However, the neural mechanisms that underpin such age differences are inadequately understood. In this study, we aim to characterize the optimal neural model underlying a dynamic decision making task in both young and older adults, and further examine the age differences from the perspective of effective connectivity. Twenty-five young and 23 older adults performed a dynamic risk taking task, i.e., the balloon analogue risk task, in the functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The dynamic causal modeling analysis, with the coupling between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior insula (AI) that were identified in our task-related activation and psychophysiological interaction analysis, was performed to address the best fitting neural model and characterize age differences. Although both age groups adopted the same optimal model with bidirectional connection between the VMPFC and DLPFC, older adults exhibited up-regulation in several connections and among which the increased modulatory effect of AI-to-VMPFC subserving their decision quality. Our finding suggests that older adults might utilize different neural strategy via compensation to counteract the impact of advanced age in risk taking process., (Copyright © 2020 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)