Enjoying the Sunny Side of the Street
Seniors tend to emphasize the positive more than younger people do, and for good reason. As people age, they gain not only life experience but better emotional balance.
By Kay Harvey
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
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“Older and better” is more than a hopeful cliché, new research shows. As people age, they gain not only more life experience but better emotional balance.
Unlike young people, individuals age 55 and up pay more attention to positive influences than negative ones, studies have shown. Known as the “positivity effect,” that factor offers advantages for personal well-being.
The shift in emotional priorities develops over time, rather than more abruptly during such significant life events as midlife crisis or menopause, a new study has found. “Perhaps it’s the gradual accumulation of life experiences that causes us to change our outlook in this way,” says Michael Kisley, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who directed the study with Stacy Wood of Scripps College and help from UCCS students.
Study participants ages 18 to 80 viewed dozens of images, including pretty sunsets (considered positive), a man at a computer (neutral) and a car crash (negative) while their brain reactions were being monitored. Participants ages 18 to 25 registered more intense responses to emotionally negative images than to positive ones, suggesting that this may be a natural response for young people. “Some have suggested this serves a protective function for us, helping to keep us aware of potential dangers in our immediate environment,” Kisley says.
That pattern reversed among study participants ages 55 to 80, whose brain wave responses showed a diminished attention to the negative images, as opposed to increased attention to the positive images. It was that change that accounted for the shift. “It’s not necessarily that older adults are paying more attention to positive things,” Kisley says, “but rather that they seem to just be paying less attention to negative ones.”
Previous studies have shown that older adults typically report higher well-being than younger adults, apparently because of growing motivation to optimize social and emotional goals. For example, older adults tend to spend more time and energy nurturing meaningful social relationships than young people do, Kisley says. The new study’s findings have positive implications for older people’s ability to deal with difficulties that often come with aging, such as loss of a spouse or serious health problems.
The study was reported in the fall 2007 issue of Psychological Science, a psychology journal. Its title: “Looking at the Sunny Side of Life.”
Could there be a lesson here for younger people?
“I certainly think so,” Kisley says. “For whatever reason, many older adults devote less of their brain power to negative things. Call it 'getting old' or call it 'wisdom,' it just seems like a good idea.”
'I Like to Be a Protagonist' 
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