We’re often told that youth is the best time of life. A team of researchers at Stanford decided to check, by following the same people for more than a decade. What they found should reassure anyone who has started counting gray hairs.
In short
- Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen led a study of about 180 Americans aged 18 to 94.
- Between 1993 and 2005, participants carried pagers and rated their feelings on the spot.
- As they got older, they reported fewer negative emotions and more positive ones.
- The results were published in the journal Psychology and Aging.
Pagers in their pockets
Asking people how they felt in the past is unreliable, so the researchers measured emotions in real time. For one week every five years, participants carried pagers. Each time the pager buzzed, they answered right away, rating how happy, satisfied and comfortable they felt, Stanford explained. Carstensen worked with postdoctoral fellows Bulent Turan and Susanne Scheibe, as well as researchers from Penn State, Northwestern, the University of Virginia, UC San Francisco and UCLA.
The study ran from 1993 to 2005. Participants who died or aged out of the younger groups were replaced with new ones, so the team could compare people at different ages and follow the same people over time.
What they found
With age, participants reported fewer negative emotions and more positive ones than they had when they were younger. “Our findings suggest that it doesn’t matter when you were born,” said Carstensen, a psychology professor and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. “In general, people get happier as they get older.”
That is what her first sentence means: the improvement didn’t depend on the decade people were born in. On average, the emotional side of life tended to get better with age, not worse.
There’s a nuance: older participants also reported a mix of positive and negative emotions more often than younger ones did.
Why it happens
Carstensen explains it with her theory of “socio-emotional selectivity”: when people sense that their time is limited, they invest in what matters most to them. “As people age, they’re more emotionally balanced and better able to solve highly emotional problems,” she said. Small rituals that bring calm can play their part too, like the bay leaf some people slip under their pillow.
Not a magic switch
Age doesn’t rewrite personality, Carstensen warns. “Most of the grumpy old men out there are grumpy young men who grew old,” she said. “Aging isn’t going to turn someone grumpy into someone who’s happy-go-lucky.”
The limit
The study followed about 180 Americans, which is small, and its results are averages: they don’t describe every older adult. Health, loneliness or loss can weigh heavily at any age. And feeling more balanced doesn’t mean never feeling sad. The pagers captured ordinary moments of daily life, during one week every five years, not a full picture of each person’s life. What we do every day says something about us, as psychologists note about people who clean their kitchen at night.
That’s the story.
