The Elderly: Shiny, Happy People

The mellow elderly

Many elderly people seem sweet and happy, don’t they? Well, it is not your imagination. Science confirms that they are for a very specific reason.

Negative memory reduction

A research project between members of Alberta and Duke Universities reveals that brain activity in older people specifically causes them to remember fewer negative events than younger people. Further, the events they do remember do not seem so bad, or strike as much of a negative emotional reaction as in younger people.

Changes in brain activity

This is because seniors actually use their brains differently than younger people in storing memory, according to the scientist heading the study. Age related changes were discovered in elderly brain activity when participants of an average age of 70 years old were shown images of either neutral or strongly negative events.

Changes in interaction within the brain

The study, just published this month in the December edition of Psychological Science, clarified that there was no structural change in the emotional center of the brain among the different age groups. The emotional reaction in the elderly is altered as a result of changes in how those emotional centers interact with other parts of the brain such as memory.

Less stress

Another related effect is that when elderly people do remember negative events they are clinically proven to tend to view them as less stressful than younger people do. As far as negative images and memories are concerned, research observed a generally lower response in older people.

The older the memory, the better

In other words, it’s true: we don’t just mellow with age, we get happier.