New studies help explain why, despite having more experience, senior citizens often make unprofitable financial choices

The young are fearless and bold. The old are scared and cautious. That’s the conventional view of how we feel about risk over the course of a lifetime. New research in behavioral economics and neuroscience, however, is complicating this simple picture.

Contrary to the popular notion that young people are reckless, while older people avoid risks, new research shows that in an investment task that involves balancing risk to make the most money, older people make more mistakes than their younger counterparts.

It's not memory loss or senility that leads to mistakes, but increased "noise" in parts of seniors' brains.

Ageing may cloud your financial judgement, thanks to "noise" in an area of the brain critical for predicting pay-offs, suggests a study of people who played an investment game in a brain scanner.

A little stress may help you make good decisions… but a lot will leave you choosing unwisely.

Stanford researchers report that worrying about something before it happens might do more than just create knots in your stomach.

As I've mentioned before, I come from a long line of worriers. So I was pleased to get a press release about a new study that suggested a little fretting might be a good thing. I felt compelled to call Gregory Samanez-Larkin, the Stanford psychology grad student who's the study's lead author, although I was a little anxious about what he might have to say.
 

Anxiety gets a lot of bad press. Dwelling on the negative can lead to chronic stress and anxiety disorders and phobias, but evolutionarily speaking, anxiety holds some functional value.