Laura Carstensen

The main drivers of this improvement in what I would call emotional balance, so the ratio of positive to negative, the main driver is a reduction in negative emotions.

Not so much an increase in positive, but because there's no decline in positive, on balance we experience more positive than negative in everyday life.

I do think there's merit to the theory that the comparative strength of pain weakens the more experiences we've had.

However, when we first began this line of research and found that older people were doing better emotionally and experiencing less sadness, there was some question about a physiological basis grounded in a kind of a deficit in the ability to feel.

So can we not experience intense anything?

And that makes us feel better emotionally.

And so with Paul Ekman and Bob Levinson and Wally Friesen, we ran a study where we induced strong negative emotions and strong positive emotions in younger and older people in the laboratory, measuring facial expression, physiological responding, and so on, as well as subjective response to memories.

And older people look very much like younger people there.

So it didn't look like the emotion system was broken in that sense, right?

It wasn't that we're unable to feel things deeply or strongly.

But older people tend not to.

So I think what I would guess is that we're navigating that.

those intense emotions better, being able to pull ourselves away from them better than younger people do.

Even looking back without more maturity, we tend to remember the past more positively than it was actually experienced.

We ran a study years ago with an order of Catholic nuns.

And this was actually the initial data collection was now probably 4%.

40 years ago, close to it.

But we asked them a series of questions about their day-to-day lives and how they felt about many aspects of their life.

And then we were able to go back to these sisters who very graciously completed the same questionnaire from the perspective of how they would have completed it then.

And it turns out that they remembered the past more positively than they had actually reported it to us.