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Aging is not a discovery of the 21st century. However, what is unprecedented is that the group of old people outnumber the rest of the population in many countries of the world. In recent years there has been a proliferation of empirical studies about aging, cognition, emotion and their interaction. At the present time, a growing number of research shows that emotions remain intact in old age, contributing to improve performance in cognitive tasks. This research offers a global vision of the aspects that regulate emotions in the cognitive function of old people.

This paper describes cognitive-emotional theories of aging with the objective of providing new theoretical knowledge on aging phenomena. According to these theories, emotion and cognition determine distinct itineraries in terms of develoment. While cognition performance declines with chronological age at a lineal rate, emotion remains intact and even contributes to improve cognitive performance in the older segments of life.

The cognitive-emotional theories of aging affirm that with age increases the emotional bias with positive valence in the processing of information that elderly people perform. In this article the concept of positivity in aging is discussed in relation to the deficit of inhibitory control and the perception of limited time, characteristics associated with age.

In the context of narrative gerontology emerges the subjective perspective of knowledge of behavior in the last stage of life. This perspective aims to empower older people while the narrative of their own lives contributes to complete the training of students of humanities degrees in social, educational and health contexts. The purpose of the research is to review the different narrative histories of life in old age, the similarities and differences as well as the functions and peculiarities of each of the narratives.

In decision-making, not only cognitive processes such as executive function and memory are involved, but emotional processes also intervene. In this research, the emotional aspects involved in the decision making of older people are defined. In particular, the location of the sources of the emotional process, the somatic marker, the reasoned emotion, the intuition and the emotional evaluation model of decision making are described. The contents discussed are based on Damasio’s emotional theory.

This work merges from our interest for the evolution of deductive reasoning across the life cycle from youth to older age. With time, reasoning resources seem to be compromised and constrained, even if on the other side they seem more flexible. The literature on deductive reasoning considers that deduction only takes place between integrable premisses, that is, premisses whose elements share any categorematical term. The present research designed, applied and analyzed an instrument to measure deduction. The measure is based on integration as a general rule to deduce a conclusion from two premisses. The internal consistency of the instrument was .775 and its validity was approved by 10 experts. The transversal design had a sample of 37 young and 42 older persons, 12 of which had university degrees. Both young and old groups commit less failures with integrable elements than with non-integrable (p=.000), Importantly, the group of young reasoners show less correct answers differences between integrable and non-integrable inferences. As a conclusion, the high number of deductive errors among older persons in non integrable inferences can be explained because they seem to handle heuristic rules with a low abstraction level, of the kind: “if premisses are not integrable, then the inference is false”. The higher scores obtained by young reasoners with non integrable inferences is eventually explained in terms of the search for subjacent logical reasons in non integrable or even apparently incoherent inferential tasks.

We find ourselves in the era of information technology and virtual communication. For this reason, it is more necessary than ever to implement educational resources based on social competence if we want that the invasion of machines won’t impose their rules over society in the twenty-first century, namely: productivity, moral indifference, emptying of feelings and emotions, etc. The present study aims to explore the social competence of young and old persons which regularly use technologies. The sample consisted in a group of 30 young university students and 38 older persons participating in introductory computer courses. The evaluation tool was a Social Abilities Questionnaire with which it is measured both the self-evaluation of the own’s social competence and the evaluation of peers. Results, in general terms, show more similitudes than differences between young and older persons: 1. Coincidence in the higher self-evaluated ability (give thanks). 2. The valuation of the own social competence is higher than that of the peers.

Getting to know the capacities and limitations of the reasoning brain can help us to understand why some learning situations are efficient while others are not. Brain imaging techniques can offer this information, hence current neuroscience is inclined to use service-learning methodologies which include emotion when measuring mental and brain learning efficiency. In this paper we collect results from empirical research on logico-emotional training based in control by inhibition strategies. This strategy consists in training subjects in self-instructions to avoid falling into the perceptive pairing bias. Results show an increase in the percentage of success from 10% to 90% of the trained subjects, as opposed to subjects trained with other methodologies commonly used in the classroom. As a conclusion, it has been shown that brain activity hints of metacognition imply a deeper and more successful learning experience in the teacher/pupil diad.