Laura Carstensen

And at random times during each of seven days, we paged them and asked them to tell us the extent to which they were feeling each of 19 different emotions.

Some were positive emotions like joy, happiness, calm.

Some were negative emotions like anger, sadness, fear.

And so we had this detailed process.

record now for individuals about their emotional lives.

We found that

increasingly older people had fewer negative emotions, less anger reported, less fear, less disgust, and just as much happiness, joy, calm.

And so this was consistent with these findings about psychopathology as well, right?

Now we had a normal, healthy population from the community, and we were observing something similar.

It wasn't just us who worried about it.

It was the whole field that was in disbelief.

So the general public kind of didn't buy it.

More importantly, the scientific community was very eager to scrutinize these findings and figure out what was wrong.

And in science, nothing better can happen than that.

Having a finding that lots of other laboratories, lots of other investigators say, I don't quite believe it.

I'm going to look at it this way.

Maybe X explains it.

Maybe Y explains it.

So there was one alternative that people were reporting that they were happy because they didn't have the cognitive ability to really ruminate and generate lots of negative emotions.

If you can't remember how upset you were yesterday and how people treated you, then you're not going to feel bad about it.