Older but Mellower: Aging brain shifts gears to emotional advantage
Bruce Bower
Given all the bad news that science has delivered about brain cells withering and memory waning as the years mount, older people have a right to be cranky. But, instead, the over-50 crowd handles life's rotten realities and finds life's bright side more effectively than whippersnappers do. In no small part, that's because the aging brain makes critical emotional adjustments, a new study indicates.
Advancing age heralds a growth in emotional stability accompanied by a neural transition to increased control over negative emotions and greater accessibility of positive emotions, according to a team led by neuroscientist Leanne M. Williams of Westmead (Australia) Hospital. A brain area needed for conscious thought, the medial prefrontal cortex, primarily influences these emotional reactions in older adults, Williams and her colleagues say.
In contrast, people under age 50 experience negative emotions more easily than they do positive ones. These younger adults' emotion-related activity centers on the amygdala, a brain structure previously implicated in automatic fear responses.
This gradual reorganization of the brain's emotion system may result from older folk responding to accumulating personal experiences by increasingly looking for meaning in life, the researchers propose in the June 14 Journal of Neuroscience.
Evidence that emotional functions improve in older brains "indicates that our ability to register the significance of information is preserved, and even enhanced, as we age," Williams says. Older people may benefit from associating information they need to remember with personally significant matters, such as a favorite tune, he adds.
Ironically, older individuals' reliance on the medial prefrontal cortex to regulate emotions comes as aging kills cells in this area. The surviving neurons somehow pick up the slack, the investigators note.
The researchers studied 122 males and 120 females, ages 12 to 79, who had no current or past mental illnesses and good physical health.
Scores on a questionnaire that assesses emotional stability rose steadily from adolescence into the senior years.
Brain testing occurred as volunteers viewed images of various facial expressions. They had been told to identify the emotion in each expression and to rank its intensity. Researchers measured neural response using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which tracked blood-flow changes, and an electrode-studded cap that monitored brain cells' electrical responses.
In older adults, mushrooming medial prefrontal cortex activity triggered by negative facial expressions occurred in conjunction with neural responses that have been linked to conscious thought. This pattern appeared even in older adults who displayed especially low numbers of prefrontal neurons.
In contrast, young people showed far more medial prefrontal activity, and thus conscious thought, in response to positive facial expressions than older people did.
The new results provide a neural framework for growing evidence that, unlike young people, older adults focus on positive information and downplay negative events, remarks psychologist Mara Mather of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The amygdala showed little volume decline with age in the new study, so it's unlikely that age-related shrinkage of that structure causes the psychological shift, she adds.

I knew that already

Hiya,
wow at least i know i got something to look forward to as i approach the last years of my forties hehe ... Mymum has Altzheimers and its scary so this is a nice article to read. Thanks for sharing it.
You know your blog is always interesting hon.
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June xxx

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My brain is old and i feel very tired and it is also over active.....i have always felt as if am 40 years older than i have been, like when i was 20 i felt i was 40 and it continues, never changed, am also glad to achieve so much knowledge and experiences at a very tender age and it also still continues, and this article is correct.. younger the individual are the more temper and negative emotion, am slowly getting around to that, i acknowledge it as experiences at this stage of my life, maybe who knows i might discover more as i continue this life challenge/s

Good article. I am having memory problems, mostly recalling names. However, otherwise I think my brain is functioning pretty well at capacity, haha. I believe it is easier for older people to deal with adversity because of their many experiences in life. Younger people have to learn and live everything for the first time and it is difficult.

Hey, my friend! Just wanted to pop in for a quick coffee and get a quick peek at your own journey. The above experiment was similar to one I read about being done by Purdue University. The purpose of the experiment was to determine if there was a measureable physiological just prior to a psychic event. They determined that was the case but aspects of the case study you mentioned seemed similar. I hope you're able to finally slow down a bit and enjoy the spring weather. Take care!

Thanx for the comment on my blog! Good article that especially as I approach the fifty landmark at ever increasing speed lol.
Have a great week!
Al

Thanks for your comments.
I hope to pop round your journals soon before i am off on my travels again[
:o]