Laura Carstensen

The whole range.

And, you know, at the time, people also believed that Alzheimer's disease was the inevitable consequence of aging.

So that cognitive impairment would begin and would eventually progress to dementia and

So that that was the fate of people who lived very long lives.

Yes, this was an epidemiological catchment area study of mental health.

conducted in the early 1980s.

And it was not a study designed about old age at all.

It was a study that was designed so that the researchers could get a better estimate of different forms of psychopathology in the community.

And so what they did was to have trained clinicians go out into the communities

and interview a representative sample of people in a number of different geographical areas around the country.

So it was the best epidemiological study of mental health that had been done in this country, probably anywhere at the time.

The results of it were to give them pretty good estimates of the prevalence of anxiety, depression, phobias, etc., etc.,

And one of the findings that was embedded in this set of findings about prevalence was that the prevalence of every form of psychopathology, with the exception of the dementias, was observed at lower rates in older people than middle-aged or younger people.

And this really turned on its head, the idea that psychopathology, mental health problems, depression, anxiety, were part and parcel of growing old.

We studied a whole range of positive emotions and negative emotions.

We wanted to understand what emotional experience in day-to-day life was like.

So we knew from this large study of mental health problems that they had lower rates of that, but we didn't know a lot about what day-to-day emotional experience

Life was like an old age.

And so at the time, we designed a study using what was then the gold standard, probably still is, of studying emotional experience in day-to-day life.

And we gave people pagers, electronic pagers, and they carried them for a week.