Laura Carstensen

If we went back 20 years, even though life expectancy was going up, there wasn't as much of an awareness of it.

So you go back 20 years and when people were in their 60s and life they felt was kind of winding down, they were less likely to strike out on their own, to do something different.

I think today, as people are realizing just how long lives are getting,

Somebody in their 50s, somebody in their 60s looks across the breakfast table at somebody they're not particularly enamored with and say, you know, I got a long future ahead of me.

Is this really how I want to spend it?

And so we're seeing more divorces, I think in part because people are seeing their time horizons as much longer.

I think you're less likely to see somebody start a brand new chapter if they think they're in the last chapter already.

But as people look forward more positively and longer, I think we'll see more of that.

Oh, that's a great question.

And I do not know the answer to that.

If it will come to change soon,

levels of happiness.

In general, when people divorce, we see them come back to their sort of baseline levels of happiness after a period of a year or two.

So it may be a struggle, but most people will come back to that kind of equilibrium.

How this affects older people when they divorce in the long term or the short term is a question I think we don't know the answer to.

It is a fascinating question.

I agree with her.

And a researcher at Yale, Becca Levy, has shown that when you prime these negative images of aging, people respond behaviorally.

You actually walk more slowly as they're leaving the laboratory environment.

than if they were primed with positive images.