Humans Mellow with Age

Finally, some good news about getting older. Australian scientists have published research showing that humans are more positive and stable emotionally as we grow older. OK it's kind of obvious but neat that they associated these changes with actual brain activity. From the journal's press release:

A combination of life experience and changing priorities in older age affects the plasticity of the prefrontal emotional brain to allow better emotional control, suggest the authors whose study appears in the June 14 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

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First author Leanne Williams, PhD, of the Brain Dynamics Centre, Westmead Millenium Institute and University of Sydney, and her colleagues show that from adolescence to the late 70s, people become less neurotic and more able to control their emotions as they age, which corresponds with a shift in the medial prefrontal brain networks that help adjust responses to positive and negative emotional input. Brain scans showed that older subjects recognized negative emotions less than positive ones, and their medial prefrontal brain areas were more active when processing negative emotions than positive ones, indicating better control over brain responses to negative emotions.