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Saturday, 17 June 2006 11:35

BNN: British Nursing News Online · www.bnn-online.co.uk

The brain gets 'mellow' with age

A study of the brain has revealed that people become more “mellow” in response to negative emotions as they age.

A total of 242 healthy men and women aged between 12 and 79 were assessed for the study using emotional well-being questionnaires.

Neurotic traits were found to decrease with advancing age, with the 12 to 19 age group the most neurotic and the 50 to 79 age group the least neurotic.

Researchers then used MRI scans and measurements of electrical activity to monitor brain responses to facial expressions of emotions. Younger groups were significantly better at recognising fear but less accurate at recognising happiness.

The scans also showed that older people’s brains were more active when processing negative emotions than positive ones, indicating that older people have better control over brain responses to negative emotions than younger people.

Writing in the journal, Dr Leanne Williams and colleagues at the Brain Dynamics Centre, Westmead Millennium Institute in Sydney, Australia concluded: "These findings provide new evidence that emotional wellbeing improves over seven decades of the human lifespan.

"We propose that life experience and changing motivational goals may drive plasticity in the medial prefrontal brain to increase selective control over the balance of negative and positive emotion."

Professor Helen Fisher, an expert in human emotion at Rutgers University in New Jersey said: "Hopefully, these findings will begin to usher in a new and more positive understanding of the aging process."

Dr Simon Surguladze, deputy head of the department of neuroscience and emotion at King's College London said the control over negative emotions in older people was likely to be an evolutionary trait.

"In my opinion people have acquired this over hundreds of years of evolution - so that in growing old, the brain selects positive reinforcement more easily to balance losses in life and mental health.

"The brains are adjusted so people are not going into depression - there is a balance in the control of emotion."

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