Emotion and Aging: Exploding the Misery Myth

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only check out our YouTube original Channel uctv Prime at youtube.com/ uctv Prime subscribe today to get new programs every week [Music] good evening I'm Wendy Mendes and I'm a professor here at UC San Francisco in the department of Psychiatry and school of medicine and along with my co-chair professor Alyssa eel who unfortunately isn't here tonight because she's giving a tedmed talk down in San Diego um but imagine that she's here as I say say we are delighted to welcome all of you to our six week Mini Medical School on emotions thoughts and health over the next six sessions you'll be hearing from some of the top researchers in the field of emotion and aging these researchers will use a variety of research techniques from Neuroscience to cell biology to examining facial muscles that have been linked to emotion observational techniques and subjective experiences but all of them will focus on similar questions and that is how our thoughts and emotions affect our brains and bodies and how these relations differ across the lifespan we're starting our Series this evening with a researcher who has provided many of the foundational ideas you'll be hearing about across this series and has revolutionized the field of emotion and aging Professor Laura kenson is a professor of psychology and the Fairly Dickinson professor in public policy at Stanford University where she's the founding director of the Stanford center on longevity Professor Carson is a prolific and renowned expert on emotion and aging indeed in this field of research she is a superhero whose theory and empirical Studies have informed and inspired researchers from a variety of disciplines she's been well decorated for her achievements winning numerous awards for teaching and research including but not limited to a Guggenheim fellow a Richard kicia award for Innovative research and the distinguished career award from the gerontological Society of America I'm thrilled to be introducing Professor Laura Carson who will be talking about emotion and aging exploding the misery myth thank you Wendy that was very generous no one has ever called me a superhero before I was going to qualify that with in in an introduction but I don't I think anyone's everever called me a superhero in any context before thank you all for being here tonight um there's a little bit of glare in my eyes so if I look like I can't see you it's true um what what I'm going to talk about uh tonight are motivational changes that occur as people grow older and the ways in which these motivational changes come to affect um the decisions we make the preferences uh we hold the feelings we experience um even what we see hear and remember but before I talk about motivation and emotion and aging um I want to say a a little bit at the beginning of this series especially about about the demographic changes that are underway in this nation and in developed countries around the world now I know that you know that people are living longer and I know that you know that societies are getting grayer you know you hear about it on your television sets you read about it in your newspapers every day so I know you know these statistics but I sometimes worry that we hear about them so much that we've come to accept them with a kind of a complacency you know I mean what could be slower and steadier and duller than getting older and older and older and so I want to spend just a couple minutes and see if I can convince you at just how extraordinary this historical period is the historical period that we are are living through um more years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century then all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined in historical terms in a blink of an eye we nearly double the length of time that we live so if any of you feel like you haven't got this aging thing quite pegged don't kick yourself it's brand new uh this is a remarkable change in humankind throughout most of human evolution life expectancy was about 18 or 19 some people say 20 but it's a guess we don't know for sure but it was short um and it was touch and go for the species because in humans you of course have to grow old enough to be able to reproduce and then hang around long enough to make sure those Offspring can grow old enough to reproduce it was touch and go for the species for humans for for millions of years but evolution acted on Aging it acted in the way that Evolution acts at a snail-like pace and gradually slowly life expectancy gets a little bit longer and a little bit longer and a little bit longer and now let's fast forward to the um mid 1800s in the United States life expectancy had reached something like 35 1900 life expectancy had gone to 47 and by the end of that Century life expectancy was 77 today it's 7 eight and the change isn't finished with us yet in recent years a month has been being added to average life expectancy at 65 every year so we're continuing to see life expectancy go up by 2015 there will be more US citizens over the age of 60 than under 15 and that's a game changer you know you just think about that for a minute that is just going to change every aspect of Life as We Know It the nature of family of work of financial [Music] markets in fact what is happening is that that population pyramid that we learned about in school remember the pyramid you can do for basically any species you have lots at the bottom and then as age goes up it's winnowed to a tiny Peak those few who survive and what is happening to this population pyramid and this is just 1950 um is that it is Shifting and being rectangularization world are having the opportunity to grow old so there's no reason to think that we are biologically heartier than our ancestors 10,000 years ago 20,000 years ago what has changed is that more of us survive more of us reach old age and this is getting to a point where virtually all of us reach old age so old age has become typical it's become normative one of my favorite jokes is from a cartoon where there are two women sitting on a park bench and one of them to old women and one of them turns to the other and says I'm getting so old my friends in heaven are going to think I didn't make it but we have no excuse anymore all of us in this room you in this room uh can anticipate living to very old ages making some guesses about your backgrounds your affluence your education levels I can say that you know most of you are going to sail your 80s '90s and lots of people in this room are going to live to be 100 and that's the change that has occurred that's the change that's underway and this is extraordinary don't let anybody tell you otherwise I mean this is remarkable adding 30 years on average to life expectancy more time to realize our goals to spend time with our family to pursue our dreams this is remarkable and it's a good thing this increase in life expectancy but individuals are worried about their own aging and society's policy makers are panicking uh wondering what they will do when there are more Walkers than strollers on the sidewalks so how is it that we're so negative about this given how extraordinary the advance is I thought I would sum up the research on Aging for you in a single slide um you can see on the Y AIS any variable you like and as age goes out we see a decline now certainly this is the hypothesis that guides most research on Aging in the social sciences and the the the biological sciences I would like to tell you this is all wrong but I can't uh there are a lot of problems that happen with aging and although we've been get handed this gift of time it's hardly time to rest on our Laurels we got a lot of problems to solve but we do have the most spectacular opportunity ever any generations of humans have had well when I started uh my work in the field of Aging um I certainly was being trained uh in in this tradition that you see represented here on this slide um I was in graduate school and I was studying both life span developmental psychology and Clinical Psychology I was learning in my courses in clinical that social isolation is associated with depression with anxiety with basically you know any mental health disorder you see more social isolation and I was learning in my courses in lifespan development that as people get older they interact with others less and I thought aha that's the reason why older people are depressed and lonely discouraged um because they aren't interacting with other people as much um and so I decided I was going to chase those two postulates or ideas and see if they might be linked and what I will tell you now is that both of these assumptions prove to be entirely untenable um but if I have one thing to say for myself it's that I I do find results of studies to be interesting and informative and so I kept asking these questions trying and trying to find where the pathology was and what the roots of the problems were and although I was completely wrong in my assumptions at that time I like to think that we learned a little bit uh along the way for example older people are happy older people are happier than younger PE middle-aged people and younger people you want to see real unhappiness look at 20 somethings 30 somethings I mean they are unhappy you see much higher rates of clinical depression anxiety phobia anything in people in that age group than you do in people over 65 um there here findings from a a survey from the CDC not from our group but this was a simple question um have you experienced significant psychological distress in the last two weeks and older people answered that affirmatively uh significantly less than middle-aged people do and less than younger people do as well um there are a lot of surveys showing the same finding a lot of Studies have now been published comparing two different Generations or three different generations and asking them in one way or another how satisfied they are with life or how uh emotionally well off they are and so on and so forth most of these studies are what we call cross-sectional they're comparing people at different ages at one point in time and so you worry when you see findings like this coming out in study after study that it could be that the greatest generation is and always was the greatest Generation that there isn't a within person developmental Improvement it's just we're comparing different generations and some generations are do better than other Generations um you could also imagine that people are answering survey questions like this with a little bit of um rationalization uh maybe older people have lower standards you know so you say how are you doing today and it's like great you know I got out of bit and so people question these kinds of surveys and thought you know maybe this really isn't uh what's going on and so years ago a little over 15 years ago now um U my students and colleagues and I began um a longitudinal study so we could look at people within themselves over time and instead of asking them these General survey type questions we used what's called an experience sampling methodology and this is considered the gold standard of emotional sampling of sampling of emotional experience because you can imagine if I say to you right now how happy are you you go into a kind of cognitive mode you know you're going to compare yourself to other things earlier you know it's it's a very intellectual question but if I say to you right now on a 1 to 7 scale how happy are you from 1 to 7 it's a different question so we really can try to um uh PR people and say right now what are you feeling so we recruited a sample of people aged 18 to 94 and we asked them to carry an electronic pager for a week and at five times a day uh random times selected we paged them and every time they were paged they told us the extent to which they were feeling each of 19 different emotions some were positive some were negative and then 5 years later we recruited those same people they came back to the laboratory we set this up again They Carried the pager for a week we get another five uh seven days of data and five years later same people come back so we're following people over time and and here's what we find um we still see this increase um in how positive people are so the higher scores here are more positive and you know this this y AIS actually diminishes the differences here you're going from you know about 0 2 to you know about 05 here and the degree of positivity so people are getting more positive reporting more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions in their day-to-day lives you see a little bit of a decline here that's not a statistically significant decline uh but you do see it in most studies so you see a little bit of uh uh a little um uh diminishment of this positive uh experience in very very Advanced ages but at no point does it return to this level in the 20s 30s nobody wants to be 20 again I've asked a lot of people that question how old do you want to be so we were entirely wrong I was entirely wrong um and convinced of that um after seeing the results of this study but also hundreds of other studies along the way uh that that people overall older people are doing better in terms of of emotional well-being they're also more stable less bumping around uh and it's not like people are becoming emotionally flat and just not experiencing emotions in fact older people are more likely to experience mixed emotions uh happiness with a little bit of sadness you know it's that tear in your eye when you see an old friend and you're happy beyond happy but there's a tinge of sadness often accompanied with it so emotional life becomes richer more complex deeper over over time so the other idea I had as I was starting this is that older people were socially isolated so now we're thinking well if they're socially isolated how can they be so happy um and we started to look at social networks more closely and we were certainly not the first to show this uh decline this negative slope in the size of people's social networks this had been shown many times before Peter frer Lang my colleague on this project and I got to this but people tended to count all the different social Partners similarly and what we did was to ask people to tell us name the people in their social network to whom they were so close they couldn't imagine life without that's this very close group and then in the next circle out people you're pretty close to but not that close as the you know the Inner Circle and you keep going out in these circles and then we looked at social networks and this is a group of people 69 to 104 and you do see the Steep decline in the overall size but there's actually not a significant change in the Inner Circle so there's less of a decline in contact as people get older with people to whom they're very close people that they have a strong emotional connection so if you computed the ratio of emotional closeness or the density of a network it actually gets increasingly dense with people you care a lot about as you get older and we've done some other work asking people how these changes came about what they they were thinking and it looks like there are a lot of people in social networks who appear there for some reason other than they are your soulmate or possible soulmate they're the parents of your children's friends they're co-workers they're people you like you care about some others not so much and it looks like what happens as people get older is they're increasingly selective about those people who belong in that social network the people who they're going to take the time for and invest in and so they come to let the more peripheral people go um when you first look at these numbers some people say yeah it's cuz people died you know and there is loss because of death certainly as we get older all of us know that um but you wouldn't think that people who are less close to you die more than people who are close to you um and in fact freder Lang who was my collaborator on this first study followed these same people 5 years later and asked him the same questions you know who's in your social network and had brought along with him on the interview what they had said five years earlier and anybody who wasn't mentioned the second time he said you know last time you said Bob was in there and how come and the most common reason that people gave was you know I'm not so crazy about Bob so it was a voluntary uh kind of a a shift that we saw and what people were doing so a lot of people in the field um called this um combination of effects that is smaller social networks along with a lot of other bad stuff that happens as people get older I mean loss of social status death of loved ones uh physical illness there's a lot that goes wrong with age we know this um but people are doing better in terms of well-being and a lot of people came to call this and write about what's called the Paradox of Aging this preservation or Improvement in well-being despite losses that come with age well we thought a lot about this um uh combination of factors and and you know in my group we were really used to being wrong so we gone study after study trying to test these hypotheses or ideas that we had believed when we began and um we started thinking that maybe this wasn't a paradox at all but rather that as people get older motivation shifts they're interested in different things they're making more selective choices about what they do what goals they pursue and because of those kinds of changes they come to experience life more positively and we began to to think about time and this was really because we interviewed an awful lot of people after they participated in studies where we weren't supporting our hypothesis and we'd say well why aren't you interacting more you know wouldn't that be great you know if you could have a larger social net and so on so forth and people kept talking to me about time and they'd say things like I don't have time for those people and you know I was like in my 20s when I was starting this line of research and I'd look at them and kind of go look like you got a lot of time on your hands to me and it took a long time but it finally dawned on me that they weren't talking about time in the day they were talking about time left in life and you start to think about making really new close friends and if it's somebody brand new and you're 80 years old the numbers don't work you know is the prospects of close acquaintances new ones um is lessened and um it may be that people were really somehow thinking about time now you know humans are uniquely able to monitor time to the best of our knowledge we're the only species that monitors lifetime now other species certainly monitor clock time calendar time of course we know that but we all in this room can appreciate our own mortality we know we're not going to be here forever and we have a kind of a running clock going on and um all of us have some estimate about how much time we've got left it's not very specific and we know of course there are no guarantees um but we sort of think we have a certain amount of time left and we set goals accordingly so goals are always set in temporal context always any kind of goal you know my goal for this evening and talking with you all is different than if we were beginning a 10-week seminar you know we always set our goals you run into somebody in the hallway out here and you're rushing into a lecture you have a different kind of conversation than if you sat down next to them on a park bench on a nice sunny day so we we always have our goals framed in some temporal context and we started to think you know if because of the chronological the association let me say between chronological age and time left in life um we may see a shift in goals because the type of goals that are realized in the short term are different than goals that are realized in the long term this theory is called socio emotional selectivity Theory um and what we argue is that time's passage changes our perspective on our own life and our own lifespan and that when we're young um time see seems to just stretch endlessly out before us we have these long and nebulous Futures that are hard to predict we don't know what'll happen and when we see time in that way when we understand time to be vast um we tend motivationally to be in a kind of a banking mode we need to learn and acquire information and knowledge because it might pay off somewhere down the line we can get young people for example to study um in organic chemistry some of them love it love it but they are the minority a lot of them are taking it because it's going to open a door somewhere down the line you can't get 80y olds to take an organic chemistry early in life in a social sense uh we're also willing to take risks young people they'll go on blind dates Stanford students tell me sometime that sometimes they'll date people they don't like because it's interesting to figure out why [Music] you know people over 50 they don't do that you don't have time to mess around so younger people go to mixers and parties uh they join teams clubs like to expand their Horizons learn new information travel and as people get older and or perceive time as becoming more constrained see time Horizons shrinking rather than become uh depressed and dejected worried about time running out um in some sense as people come to see time Horizon shrinking they're relieved of the burden of preparing for the future and you can start to live in the day you can stop and smell the roses when people perceive time as Limited in some way they see very clearly what's important and what's not older people and or people younger people who see time as as as limited tend not to get terribly distressed by those hassles that can make the young ones ruminate for days and hours um but rather focus on what really matters and for most people what really matters are other people that inner circle of people that you can't imagine life without and so people begin to get more selective and it tends to be good for mental health um so the way we're seeing this now is that these two uh phenomena that we were so wrong about that is improved psychological well-being and a smaller social network a smaller core of people in one's life are related but not in the way that we thought they would be related when we embarked on this research Journey years ago um marriages improved by the way when time Horizons shorter people can let those really irritating qualities of your spouses go um you know it's you you start to say you know we're not going to we don't have all the time in the world and it's easier to forgive it's easier to feel grateful and we see those changes emotionally as well with ag well when we started developing this Theory one of the first things that we had to do was to show that goals do change as a function of time time Horizons and so um we began a a series of studies uh uh where we manipulated time Horizons uh experimentally so here's the basic Paradigm and I tell you we did dozens of these kinds of studies some version of them or another but but essentially we would say excuse me two younger and older people we want you to imagine that the following three people are available to you behind door number one door number two door number three you've got 30 minutes free which person do you choose to spend your time with and one we spent years doing research to identify these types of social Partners but one is often you know close a member of your family or a close friend another would be the author of a book you just read and another would be an acquaintance with whom you seem to have much in common so that third is you know sort of promises the fantasy of a future you know you might they might pay off somewhere but in the long run an author of a book you just read tends to be high on information value and relatively low on emotional closeness a member of your family for better for worse for most people that's an emotionally significant person so we ask younger and older people that question younger people reply and sort of evenly randomly random rates across those three different social Partners older people not so older people choose a member of their immediate family or a close friend and we said that's because that's who they're invested in you know time Horizons are shorter and you can say yeah but it could just be that nobody else will talk to the old people you know they're going to talk to their you know close friends or family or you could say um uh it isn't that it's not what they want it's just what they feel most comfortable with or something like that so they're all these different we're saying no it's time and so we then um would add a condition to these studies and we would say now I want you to imagine you're about to move across country you're going by yourself without family or friends you're in the middle of packing but you find yourself with 30 minutes free following three people available who do you choose same three options we've limited time for younger people now and what we find when we ask them this question who do you choose they choose to spend time with a member of their immediate family or a close friend so with this simple sort of manipulation of time younger people respond as older people do we thought this is great we can get younger people to look like older people really fast you know so it's it's cool we thought well could we get older people to reply like younger people and so we ran this condition I want you to imagine that you just got a phone call from your physician who's told you about a medical advance that virtually ensures you'll live about 30 years longer than you expected in relatively good health following three people are available to you who do you choose older people no preference for their close friends or family gone in fact in one study they actually had had a lower lower rate of choosing that than younger people did younger people thought it'd be cool to call their parents and tell them you know about the new medical advance so we can eliminate that effect so what we're arguing with this theory is that it's not about age it's not chronological age it's not about a generation but rather this is about time Horizons and how people experience life when time Horizons are long and vast and nebulous and when time Horizons are more certain but also uh shorter well these were you know laboratory based uh hypothetical studies um but we have now over the years mostly Helen fun has over the years um collected run so many of these studies that when something happens like a natural disaster 9911 a SARS outbreak she has Baseline data on these choices and then she'll quickly run a study say when the SARS epidemic broke out in Hong Kong and finds that younger people in Hong Kong no longer want to spend time with authors and recent acquaintances in Focus after the epidemic had passed asked by about 6 months they were now responding as they had before picking choices that looked like they were about the future banking on the future after 9/11 same thing uh younger people wanted to focus on close friends and members of their immediate family it took about 6 months and it went away so time sort of expanded again for people so we've seen this both in experiments where we tightly control all these different factors but also under naturalistic conditions uh where we see um events that remind people of the fragility of life well we began to think about how these changes in time Horizons might also change the kinds of information that people process attend to remember because your brains don't operate like a computer brain don't take in all information evenly but they selectively process and attend to information that's relevant to our goals so if people as they get older are pursuing different goals than people who are younger and they are then we would see systematic changes in the types of information that people process and remember that was the General thinking so in one of the first studies that we did examining the effects of these changes on cognitive processing we worked with an advertising agency to develop pairs of advertisements that were identical in every way that is each in the set except for the slogan so advertisers know that if they want you to get byy a product they should tell you that that product will help you realize your dreams so and one we say capture the unexploited world this is a camera ad and the other in that pair says capture those special moments so we change the slogan uh only from one that's emotionally meaningful to one that's about exploration information so here's another example this is a watch ad successes Within Reach don't let time pass you by um take time for the ones you love don't let time pass you by so we would show a series of these advertisements to people and later ask them to tell us which ones they PR preferred and which ones they remembered while the preferences were clear older people are what you see here in the red bar and older people overwhelmingly preferred the advertisements that had emotionally meaningful slogans that were promising emotional rewards so this was the preference now again you could say this is a generational effect this is a cohort effect it's just that people from different Generations like different kinds of things and so and another spin off this this this line of research before we ask people to tell us which of them they liked better we said I want you to imagine you just got a phone call from your physician told you about a new medical Advance you're going to live 20 years longer in relatively good health and then which one of these do you like and this um effect of older people liking the emotional slogans better and those advertisements disappears we now know see see no difference and the references of older and younger people for these different kinds of advertisements but of course what we were really interested in was memory what did they remember and certainly those are all the the the marketing people were watching us you know and talking with us about the study what did they remember and for younger people it doesn't make any difference whether they're emotionally meaningful slogans or knowledge related slogans they remember the slogans just as well um and the products you get the same findings for products so these are slogans products same thing but here's what happens for older people we do see this difference older people remember the slogans the emotional meaningful ones better than the ones that are knowledge related or expansive exploring and you know we started thinking this was interesting because you all know that memory declines with age um and it does and it you know we we have data from our studies too that it does um but we started to think you know I think we may be putting older people at a disadvantage AG in these memory studies CU here's the typical memory study on cognitive aging you walk into a laboratory it says memory memory Laboratory first on the door so you know you make it's clear and you know this isn't going to go well you know if you're older you know and you come in and then they say here's this long list of words we want you to remember now those words have nothing to do with anything you've ever seen sometimes the researchers make up new words to make sure you've never seen them before so these are nonsense words and you know the remarkable thing is younger people will remember them I think that's actually more remarkable than the fact that older people don't do so well so now again I don't don't don't misunderstand me there are changes in memory but I do believe that most of our studies are putting people at a disadvantage because if it if if you present information to people that they don't care about that isn't relevant to them um then they're less likely to remember it to process it and um we started thinking given these changes and goals where with age people are putting more priority on things that really matter uh emotionally meaningful uh information and goals uh than younger people do that they may process emotional information differently than younger people do and we thought it might be that older people attend to and remember all kinds of emotional information better but it could be that with age we come to focus on positive information positive stimuli because if your goals are feeling good if your goals are about well-being well what you notice in life and what you retrieve from your memory influences how you feel so maybe people are motivated to attend to positive information more than negative information so I'll tell you the the after after um many studies in our laboratory but lots of studies now in Laboratories around the world um we call the effect the positivity effect it does appear that relative to younger people older people process and attend to positive information we think your brain is coming to operate process information in the service of emotion regulation those are the goals and so this is what we see we've shown this now uh with images we've shown it with an autobiographical memory we've shown it with faces you show people positive older people positive and negative information they tend to look to the positive looking at the positive aspects of life is good for mental health it's good for emotional well-being so here's an example of a study um we show people on a computer screen images that are negative and positive uh some are high arousal some are low arousal you know sadness versus fear they only see one image at a time so you're seeing this this is just to have fewer slides here for you but you see one of those images you'd look at a lot of them if you're participating in our studies we wouldn't tell you it's a Memory study at all we just ask you to go through and look at these different images in the laboratory and then after you're done we say tell us all the images that you can remember so here are results from one of the first studies we ran with younger middle-aged and older people um in all AG groups uh the emotional images which are in the orange and the blue I think this doesn't on anymore um oh there you go um are remembered better than the neutral ones so the beige color are neutral but younger people remember just the same number of positive and negative images in middle age we already see this positivity effect as we call it emerge where we there's a significant advantage in memory of positive images but looking older adults you see this whopping effect where they're remembering more positive images than negative or neutral images and what I like to point out is that this comparison here this neutral bar to These Bars that's the typical aging memory study right it's not emotional at all it's just neutral information devoid of any but but positive information much better much much better retained well in this study we don't know if it's retrieval memory or attention that is are people not paying attention in the first place or are they not retrieving information that has been attended to and stored and so with John gabrielli a former colleague of mine at Stanford who's now at MIT and who is a neuroscientist uh we ran another study where we showed people these same images but ask them to view the images while they were in a brain scanner so use functional magnetic resonance imaging were able to see activation in different regions of the brain while they're viewing the images so this wasn't when they were remembering the images it's while they're looking at the images during the viewing time and the amydala is the region of the brain that's involved in storing emotion memories and so that's where we expected to see activation as they were Imaging as we as they were viewing positive and negative and this is what we see with younger people so you see these are the neutral images um essentially no increase in activation in the amydala but when they see positive or negative images you see this activation in a migdala um here's what happens with older people you see activation to the positive ones nothing to the negative ones so it looks like the information isn't being stored um isn't being deeply processed in a way that will later be remembered now when we ran this study there had only been one other study in the literature where they showed people emotional images and and looked at amydala activation but they had only used negative images so imagine this this red bar is gone and what they concluded was H one more thing that goes wrong with age the amydala doesn't work now many people say the amydala is actually we think of it as as involved in Emotion but it's really involved in information that's Salient relevant some you could call it a Salient salience indicator too and it looks like for there's a difference in what is considered Salient so we're thinking about this now as a top down process motivation affecting cognitive processing we ran another study to look more closely at attention and participants come into the laboratory and they see on a computer screen just what you're seeing there there's always uh there are always two photographs it's always of the same person um and one is neutral one poses neutral and the other will be negative angry sad fearful or positive and in this study we were interested in how quickly people could would respond to the position of a DOT when those images disappeared so the faces appear on the screen for half a second they disappear and a DOT is behind one of those images and all the participant has to do in this study is to hit a key to the right of the keyboard or the left of the keyboard to say where the dot was everybody gets it right you know it's a high accuracy study um but what we're interested in is the reaction time to hit that key because if you're already looking at the angry face and that's where the dot is you're faster than if you're looking away from it and here's what we find younger and older people for younger people it makes no difference they're just as fast whether that dot appears behind a positive IM face or negative but for older people they're faster when the dot appears behind a smiling happy face and slower when it appears behind an angry fearful face so it looks like older people are looking away from negative images and looking toward orienting toward positive images we began to think about autobiographical memory um people remember the past generally pretty positive and um we don't know a whole lot about autobiographical memory compared to short-term memory in part because it's really hard to know whether what people tell you is correct so we do know that older people talk about their past more positively than younger people do but again could be if it was more positive um and days gone by than it is currently so you don't really know um I had conducted a study with the school Sisters of St Francis in Milwaukee uh in uh the late 18 uh 18 I'm actually not that old 1980s and um doing a doing research with Catholic nuns is great because they'll do anything you ask them and they're just really reliable we gave them a 26 page questionnaire about their Lifestyles their friendships their emotional well-being on and they completed all of them it was just great um and so one of my uh uh former graduate students quen Kennedy decided that that was we had a lot of information that people had reported it was then about 17 years later and so she went back to the sisters to the nuns and said I want you to complete this 26 page questionnaire just as you did 17 years earlier and so they did of course and um they're we're so grateful I mean they're just wonderful people um to study and um in all sorts of ways of course but uh we then divided them median split half the youngest and the oldest and compared what they had told us earlier years earlier to what they said now and what we find is what you see here that the relatively younger nuns remembered the past more negatively than they had reported it they didn't have as many friends they were more depressed more upset than they had told us and the older nuns remembered the past more positively than they had told us life was better so we see this even when we're comparing it to accuracy now as some of you I know were thinking as I was describing this study this isn't really a memory study people make this stuff up right I mean you can't remember what you said on a questionnaire you know more than a decade earlier but in some ways that's exact that is what autobiographical memory is by the way I mean it's what most of us are doing when we're thinking about our past we're drawing on all sorts of contextual information and spinning a story um uh but it's a great projective right so we're saying you know when you ask people to do that what are what are the stories they're constructing and older people are tending to pull together a more positive story than younger people do when they're asked to do the same task so we've seen evidence for this positivity effect in all sorts of ways um and all sorts of different kinds of context I do go till 8 845 right yeah that's a long time okay I'm going to keep talking I'm gonna I'm actually not going to talk for another 45 minutes I'm gonna stop pretty soon but I want to tell you about a couple more studies before I do um but we started thinking you know all development Al change has um beneficial consequences and negative consequences you know little kids go from crawling to walking that's a good thing but you know walking is dangerous for these little ones right there's always a downside to everything that changes we thought well this is a good thing we think for emotional well-being this shift in motivation and attention we think this is good for emotion um but if people any group of people you know sort of has goals that are about well-being that are shifting their attention away from what's negative toward what's positive there could be contexts where that's not a good thing let's say you're choosing your healthc care plan and you focus on what's good about the plan and not what's bad about the plan you could make a bad choice uh we think although um we're just beginning this line of research that older people may be more susceptible to financial fraud you know the Charming young guy knocks on your door comes every day so nice and if you're less likely to focus on what could be bad about this what focus on risk it could put older people at at risk and we thought there might even be something about winning and losing money that changes with age um that is does anticipatory affect what you expect to feel when you win money or you lose money does that change and we've done some research this is in collaboration with Brian kutson and Greg samanas Lar is the lead author on it uh who's now at Vanderbilt was a graduate student in our program um we ran this study that suggests that it is the case that older people are less um upset at the prospect of losing money than winning money so let me show you what we did um this is a a paradigm that Brian kudon developed it's called the monor monor monetary incentive delay task and it's a task it's it's game and it's played in the brain scanner so again we're going to look at activation in the brain as people play this game and what happens is people really win or lose money while they play the game so you're in the scanner and what you see is a cue that says on the next trial you're going to win money so this one's $5 it would go all the way down to 25 cents $5 maximum you get that cue there's a delay a pause and then this target appears and when that Target appears in your view you have to push a key real fast and if you are fast and then there's another delay if you're fast you win $5 and then there's a pause and it starts over again there are also trials intermixed where you might lose $5 down to 25 so you see the queue delay Target appears push a button and then you get this feedback up you lost $5 so this game goes pretty quickly it's rigged for every person so everybody wins and loses uh but every every body actually ends up winning some money in this so um our participants do end up winning overall but they win and lose so we see different trials where you just lost money or you just won money and we were interested in brain activation and regions associated with anticipatory effect anticipatory reward um and comparing younger and older people so I'm going to just quickly show you um some oh sorry this is this is what we're interested in so it's this delay um after you see the stimulus before you hit the target it's this this time period where there's that delay that's where we're interested in what your brain's doing okay is it getting excited about this Prospect or is it not doing anything and we find um that on Trials where people may gain this is a a win trial um these are younger brains over here older brains over here to the right and the activation patterns look very similar so we saw no real difference on gain trials in younger and older brains in regions like anterior insula and medoc caate here's loss trials younger people you're seeing the same activations on loss trials in these same regions and here's older brains there's just like nothing going on this loss the loss is not potent if you will the anticipatory loss now let me add that when people did lose older people younger people did lose no differences by age so it's not that it doesn't matter I think of the finding or the message from this study is I don't go there if I lose I'll deal with it but to to you know to to experience negative affect and response to a possible loss not not so much so we think that there there probably are downsides to this positivity effect um we started wondering whether we could eliminate it with changes in goals cuz again theoretically we think this is all being driven by goal changes as a function of time Horizons um carel lenhoff a former student who's now professor at Cornell this was her dissertation brings younger and older people into the laboratory and she asked them to make a choice about different health care plans and they see what you see on this screen before them uh these uh uh colorcoded rectangles and they take a mouse and when you click on the mouse it gives you the information about that plan so if you want to know about what plan a does for preventive care click and you'll it turns around tell you in the Dark boxes you see negative information about the plans and the light boxes you see positive information about the plans and and then the uh neutral ones you see neutral information about the plans and um people are just asked to review the information and what we find is that younger people um review pretty evenly so this is zero this means there's no real difference between reviewing positive and negative boxes so they're looking at both about the same older people they're looking at the positive information so clicking on a box that's you know is going to tell you something good about the plan and that's what we see now older people everybody in the study clicked on all the boxes so everybody all the boxes get turned over to look at what's there but the older people keep going back to look at what's good about the plane this is for wellbeing you know this is this is cognition operating in the service of emotional well-being look at what's good we wanted to see if we could eliminate that effect because and by the way there are are and still are some people who are saying this whole positivity effect is not driven by motivation it's driven by some neural degradation that's only affecting the processing of negative information and it goes like the story goes like this negative information is more complex it's harder to process it uh so older people just do the easy default go to positive well we just changed the goals in this study what we did in this next study is that we said to people we want you to be really accurate as you make this choice and every once in a while a little reminder of that goal would would pop on the top of the computer screen and it would say remember try to be as accurate as you can and compar caring these different plans so we changed the goal from one about feeling good to one about information and when we did that we found that there was no difference in the review of these plans in older and younger people so we're again beginning to think that this it's like there's a chronically activated default go you know when you can look on the bright side and it's good for well-being that's good but it's not that older people can't look at the negative but but it does look like it may we may need reminders as we get older to do that um because the tendency is to look away from what's negative well I hope I'm convincing you that there's some pretty good news about emotional well-being as people get older um I think older people should know this because it's a good news it's reassuring and generally when I talk to older crowds um they're they're happy about that you know it's like yeah you see a lot of people kind of nodding like yeah that seems right you know and uh so this is good but young people need to know this information young people really need to know this information because for most younger people they can't even imagine being old they really can't you know I ask students this all the time I say you know I want you to imagine yourself these are Stanford students I say imagine yourself at 40 and it takes them a while but they do and after they think for a while they do and I say what are you imagining they say themselves only with um more money and better cars fancier cars so they can do that then I say okay 50 I want you to imagine yourself at 50 you it gets a little hazy 60 very hazy 70 it's gone it's just they just can't do it it's not even it's it's just blurry it's just a blank and I think it's that people believe in this misery myth you know and and so why would they focus us on this time in life that's going to be so Bleak and why why would they put off doing what they want to do today so they might have a little money when they're old why would they do that if you think you're going to be depressed and dejected and alone and you know why would you why not travel now spend now you know run up that credit card debt um so we think that when people are making choices and planning for their own Futures uh they're not willing to put a lot of um they put off a lot of uh rewards that they could get in the short term for the long term because a it's hard to imagine it in the first place and then when they do imagine it it's it's it doesn't seem so good okay we bring Stanford students into a virtual reality laboratory this is at Jeremy balon's lab a collaborator of ours he's in the Communications Department at Stanford we also worked with Bill Sharp who's a Nobel Laurette in um economics we were thinking about ways we could get younger people maybe to save more money for their own Futures to take care of their future selves better and so um they come into the laboratory and we take their photograph this is Hal ersner hfield he's actually now at NYU and school of marketing he was a former graduate student at Sanford who ran the study who's really the lead but this is just a photograph of him that we do for the participants in the study so that's what it looks like we first take the snapshot and then we create a digital Avatar and that Avatar is either young in one condition uh so it looks like the person as they are now or older so in one condition we morph their Avatar to about age 60 and then they put on this virtual reality headgear uh that creates uh the perception that they're in an apartment the apartment has a mirror that covers one whole wall of the apartment and they go in there and they just walk around for about about 30 minutes so every time they look at this wall they see themselves and whoever's looking back it's their old self or their current age self um when they move their arm up they see you know the Avatar moves their arm up when they smile the Avatar SM and then after they've done this for about 30 minutes we ask them a lot of questions uh but embedded among those many questions is a question that goes like this if you had $1,000 today how much much of it would you allocate to your retirement [Laughter] fund and those students who had interacted with their older Avatar put more than twice as much money into retirement now we don't think that we're going to put every young person in this country into a VR study but we do think that it points to the need to create a visceral connection with ourselves in the future when people can't connect to their future selves they tend to treat their future selves the same way they would strangers can you live on Social Security sure would you want to next year no you know so we need to build this connection and we think that this points to one way uh one Avenue that we might be able to do it to really kind of build this connection so Hal sent me findings from another study that he's done following this one up uh just the other day so these are fresh off the um press uh but what Hal decided to do was to see if that older Avatar if it mattered whether the Avatar was happy or not and so in this study everybody gets their photographed or the the digital Avatar is old but sometimes the digital Avatar has a neutral face uh sometimes a sad face and sometimes a happy face and guess who the younger people say the most for it's their happy future selves so when people have something to look forward to a stage in life where not everything gets worse but some things get a lot better um we think that they'll prepare better for the future so I'm going to leave you with a thought about aging societies I've been talking a lot about aging individuals but societies are getting older and as I said when I began mostly there's concern there's concern that we're going to live in a world with that is topheavy with frail dependent incapacitated older people and I will say that we have a lot of work to do scientifically technologically to solve problems so we got a lot of work to do but we should not just be looking at what goes wrong we should be beginning to think about what a society might look like that has has more people over 60 than under 15 where those people over 60 are emotionally stable in good mental health have raised their own families and their kids put that behind them are beginning to look at life in terms of what really matters seeing that very clearly and pursuing those kinds of goals and if we begin to entertain the possible opportunities of that kind of a society and we managed to get all hands on deck older societies could be the best thing that ever happened to society and certainly the best thing that ever happened to Children um yeah I'm going to stop I'm going to leave you with a picture of my book this is just you know a blatant advertisement if you want the longer version of the the the the story uh it's on you know Kindle and Amazon and all those different places um I want to thank you for your attention you've been wonderful to listen to this time thank you to to paraphrase your question what about all those grumpy old men and women right yeah uh there are some and um almost every time I give a talk like this somebody says you know you got to meet my grandmother because and here's the finding basically people who are what psychologists would call neurotic uh High negativity focusing always on the bad tend not to benefit from age in the way that the majority of people do and there are even some studies of you know sort of reinforcement learning and people who are negative they tend not to attend to the rewards they don't learn you know as well about life and things where rewards come so it looks like there is a subgroup of people but it's pretty small but there is a subgroup of people who don't seem to show these benefits it is typical however so typically for the majority of people we're seeing do show these positive benefits now everyone again also starts at a different level on the well-being scale so if you start up here you're going like this if you start down here you're still pretty low relative to others so there certainly are individual differences um but but most people seem to be getting better yes I feel that because I've lived so long and had a lot of experence I get intient with people who you know haven't been there and they you know I just get impatient with slow Behavior whatever I guess I'm your right no you're not old enough just wait give it some time no I your your question is a serious one it is you know you can imagine you know just you get irritated with other people who who aren't let's say you are improving you are more reasoned you don't let the little things get you down but you're around people who do get down and that's irritating is what you're saying if I understand right one of the best ways that you can regulate your emotions is through what psychologists would call antecedent emotion regulation so this is a not experiencing that in the first place so and I think this social selection remember that slide where you your social network gets smaller and you're eliminating a lot of those people in life get rid of the negative people I mean that is what most older people are doing most people with ages are getting rid of those folks yes yeah so to repeat the question it's what's the what's the dividing line between uh selectivity and a positive sort of shift in goals and experience and being just delusional you know you remember the past everything's fine but you're none of it's true so is that I have that right um the these effects this positivity effect is greatest in people with the highest level of cognitive functioning executive functioning so you're seeing uh and again some people there is an alternative Theory here that I should mention um that that floats around a lot and that's that older people I think I mentioned it in passing focus on what's positive because it's easier to process they can't process the hard stuff it's I think of it as The Village Idiot you know approach to happiness you kind of oh good you know um the positivity effect isn't being isn't being explained by that well because again you measure executive function how well people can plan and deploy resources toward goals you measure that it's the people with most of that who show this positivity the most so there they're a different group of people um than people who are delusional and incapacitated uh so we're seeing that in one group there certainly is a group of older adults who suffer from dementia and delusional uh processes are often a part of that um we don't believe that we would see the positivity effect in people with with with dementia um uh but I think it's probably just an allog together different phenomena what you're saying happens of course uh and to some people I think generally they have either a long-standing psychotic disorder you know some sort of an underlying serious psychiatric disorder or are developing a dementia um so I think that's that's the these different trajectories abnormal you're [Music] talking right yeah people who are still functioning yes yes absolutely yeah yes the question is who who are you studying here you know and I do think people occasionally I love it when people ask me because I forget to say this and people think we just study like Stanford professors the ameriti or something like that so we we for all the studies I described to you we we've recruited our participants through a survey research firm that does this for us and they recruit for us two the samples are African-American and European ameran we've focused on just those two groups because if we focus on all the ethnicities in the Bay Area you end up with one of you know 100 you know so we've really focused on those two groups so we do have enough people to make those comparisons across at least two ethnic groups two racial groups and um 5050 male female and onethird blue collar workers 2/3 white collar workers and we made it that distribution because when we began this sampling method which we've now used across all these studies that was the distribution in the Bay Area it isn't anymore but that's what that's what um we began with and um we stratify uh gender race and socioeconomic status across age so we have just as many elderly African-American men as we do elderly AF uh european-american men and um make those comparisons we haven't across all these studies seen any evidence for differences by race or socioeconomic status there are some small differences in emotion that are expected ones by gender women experience more emotions than men positive and negative and more intense emotions but there's no interaction of the gender effect by age so we're seeing the same age changes for women and for men um but it looks like we're seeing this across very different uh socioeconomic groups and uh at least two uh racial groups in the US thank you yes uh there has been a fair amount of research on wisdom most of it has been done by a group at the MOX PL Institute in Berlin and their model of wisdom is what I call a very cold cognitive model it's really how well you can solve uh uh hotly charged societal issues you know what should a you know a 13-year-old girl comes to you and says that she's pregnant what should she do and then they measure the kind the quality of the an and get judges and so on to make those um determinations and it's interesting research I must say it really is but the one thing they were criticized for and I think so too is that there's no deployment in it it's just can you come up with an answer but it's really you know when do you fold them and when do you hold them you know that's and that's about emotion as people get older and I my guess is however that because knowledge increases with age and especially knowledge about practical matters of life that's going up and given that emotional well-being and Regulation and stability is also going up it makes sense to me that wisdom would be more common among older people than younger people yes yes older people do care more about the world they care more about the environment they care more about social justice than younger people do um in fact there is there's there's a a some lore that older people become more concern conservative so as you get older you're more conservative not true um in fact but but older but with age people become more personally conservative so the way people live their own lives may have more routine to it certain beliefs you've held whatever but but with age people also become more open to other ways of living it's a kind of interesting you know combination of of things that goes on here there I believe what's happening and the reason older people aren't Sinking by paying attention to the world is that they pay attention to the world and then they try to go do something about it or decide that they can't do anything about it and then put it aside and younger people are watching the news and they're they can't pull themselves away from the faces of the people in the earthquake or the tsunami you know they're glued to it and they ruminate about it and I think what happens with age is people watch it they care and they get up and they go write a check or they get on the phone or they volunteer they they do something in response to the negativity as opposed to just get pulled in and you just kind of have it weigh you down I think that's what happens there is a prize you all probably have heard of it because it's given by Civic Ventures it's based here in San Francisco it's called the purpose prize given to older people who have done exceptional things in their communities and um one of the recent P purpose Prize winners who had done just started this extraordinary company um had said he got to an age where I'm going to try to get this quote right he said I was old enough to know in Justice when I saw it and experienced enough to do something about it and that's that's the ideal combination um and but I think and I think that happens to a lot of people yes what about us Boomers we Boomers we Boomers um there's a lot of disappointment in my the world I live in with Boomers I'm counting me squarely you know amidst them we were very idealistic as youth um in our youth and I think we did some great things actually and then we dropped the ball I mean I think we did great things with the Vietnam War you know people said you can't do anything about it and we said yeah we can and we did WOW but what happened is we got distracted we started to raise our families and to pursue our own careers and we sort of fell out of that my hope um is that we now return to that with that same passion and now a lot of knowledge about how to make things happen and solve the problems of Aging societies and turn those potential problems into great gifts because the boomers are going to set the stage for what this new long life is going to look like and we've got an opportunity to turn it into something that's never before been experienced and I so I hope I do I I've got faith um that we can do more um but I I'm I'm a little more cynical about how much we accomplished so why didn't the generation after us do the same thing that we did because we did they're our children that that's easy I know I'm a psychologist I can figure that one out but yes you it's actually that's a it's a great question so why if older people can see Injustice why are they tolerating elder abuse um it's a great question um I I don't really know the answer I I guess I'd be hesitant and say they're really tolerating it what does that mean I mean have we not solved that problem yet yes we have not solved it elder abuse is a really really hard one because to solve as a group because it's so private you know people don't know when it's going on so many of them when they're asked by will deny it oh this is true too right actually this is some of the work on fraud is related to this if you didn't hear she said um they deny it um people of all ages deny it but um uh we've been doing some work uh with finra and with ARP and with the SEC on trying to get these rates of victimization here's what we know we know that older people are targeted by scam artists more than any other age group we don't know that they're more vulnerable they may be and as I said I think there's some reason to think they might be but we don't know yet whether they are um but what we do know is that reporting rates are really low so what the the the um the feds have data on people who are known victims so they have these lists of people who' have been victimized and then they call them in a survey without you know just clean no knowledge of that ostensibly have you ever been a victim of financial fraud about 40% of people say no and they're documented victim of financial fraud but they say no now you're seeing this across ages but you're certainly seeing it in older people too and given what I've just told you about the positivity effect I wouldn't be at all surprised if older people do that more even than younger people do so it's it's a problem yes we haven't found a way that we can instantiate the shift in time Horizons and do like an fmri study because you know you say to people imagine this and then you're going to put them in a study for an hour and they don't retain it so it's hard to do that we can do to them where we say imagine this now make this choice you know right there but it's hard to get it to last we have we have toyed with and tried and not been very successful yet with um actually training people in a Buddhist Meditation on death to see if we can change time Horizons that way and then do this but we so far haven't been accept successful with the the the manipulation itself so we haven't done so well there um crosscultural differences and positivity effect um we published one stud a couple years ago that yukong Kuan a a postto in my lab at that time ran in Korea and um she used the same stimula we had used in studies here went to Korea ran this study with a Korean sample no evidence for positivity effect and then we're sitting in my office and we're talking about this and I said you know are but do those images do they mean the same thing you know to people like a coffee cup a picture of something you know is that neutral and so she went back and we we always collect ratings of those images you know how positive or negative are they after the study's done and she went back and there were very different ratings so in Korea a a picture of a a a coffee cup or teacup is positive and the US it's neutral and when she recoded them according to their own ratings of what's positive and negative you saw the same effect appear so I think there are cultural differences in what's positive and not but this shift looks like it it holds across now there's certainly lots of cultures we haven't examined but this has been run in Germany and Hong Kong and Mainland China and we see similar kinds of findings there great question thank you yes yes I was wondering if your criteria for placing a person in the old category changing yeah it gets older and older yeah you know old age is 10 years older than however old you are right isn't that right um uh we calculate age in a lot of different ways uh in different studies and then and as you know 65 is the number right that um which really just dates back to bismar and who had to have a age where people were eligible for the German pension plan and we stole that number and that became old age nothing magic about 65 um but in some of and we tend not to use 65 anymore because we think people at 65 are children basically from our perspective in life but we'll usually start old age typically it'll be like 74 75 we would start and say people 74 and older um and then for the young end we don't run people usually in their early 20s because they're students and a lot of them and we don't want to confound student status with age and so we tend to start a little bit older um but in some studies like the study that I described to you that we did with the Catholic sisters we just split it in half so younger older but it was just a medium split down the middle and the St study that I showed you this longitudinal experience sampling study it's just a one big sample where we look at age as a continuous variable so but in others we do recruit specific age groups yes yes um good question does are there studies of um severe depression that leads into dementia I shouldn't have said yes I have done studies like that but there are studies in the literature um depression rates are lower in older adults than Young adults and most cases of clinical depression in old age are in people who have have a history a lifetime history of depression it's a recurrent disease so people will get over one episode and it comes back you know a year or so later or years later couple things about it one is that we know that this recurrence rate slows as people get older so you're less likely if you have a history of clinical depression of having another episode as you get older so that the the likelihood goes down what I'm told by the top uh depression um and dementia experts is that when you see a brand new case of clinical depression in an elderly person it's almost always related to an impending dementia so that it's often the initial symptoms of what goes on to be a dementia that's only in brand new cases so You' got somebody who's never had a mental health history you know clean background and then has a begins to get very depressed that's often Associated but as I say it's not it it it's that's not a it's not common to see that outside of that specific situation Chen or the egg on that one excuse me chicken or the egg on that one oh um chicken or the egg on that one for those of you didn't hear I I I don't I'm not an expert in dementia I can tell you though that I I I read a lot about it I know a lot of people doing the work in this area I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that uh an emotional disorder leads to in a causal way to dementia but dementia is an organic brain disease and we don't know why people get it we don't understand the cause but there isn't any systematic um you know evidence that would suggest it's the way people are living their lives emotionally that gets them to a dementia so you're find that then the depression is an early onset symptom of exactly right that's what it looks like that's what yeah yeah yes so what happens to whether whether you lean to the left or the right as you get older politically is one question and then is happiness have anything to do with that that um so it appears that political party is is more deeply ingrained in people and more enduring than religion people are less likely to change party than they are their religion they stay so if you a Republican when you're young you'll be a republican when you're old there's not a lot of Shifting across parties in either direction we did a study in our lab um around the 2008 election and it was it was a study on what we call affective forecasting so it's you know do you expect to be happy and before an election is a good time to do that because people have these strong expectations you know if Obama wins it's all you know hope you know it's going to be great you know or if McCain wins you know I mean you know and or the other way around you know so so I know we are in San Francisco I didn't notice that and um so so we asked people to tell us how they would feel after if their candidate won and if their candidate lost so they're making a prediction how happy would they be people are notoriously bad at this um because you think you know you win the lottery oh I'll be happy I'll be happy forever no you know within a week you're right back to your pre- lottery days um but so we wanted to know how they if they would do this and it turns out that Obama supporters were better at predicting how they would feel after the election than McCain supporters were when they lost so we'd ask them both if you win or you lose right um so we have a little bit of evidence that happy people are are Democrats but but but but we don't have the control condition we might get it in 2012 so it could just be that your older people predict better how they're going to feel when they win than when they lose and there's no difference by party but we'll run it again in 2012 and hopefully we won't be able to test that I B this thank you Dr christon he [Music] [Music]

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 66,866

Keywords: aging, misery myth, planning for your future, retirement

Id: BXhrrbQCElw

Length: 88min 18sec (5298 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2012