People of a certain vintage will fondly recall Eric Idle’s ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian movie in 1979.
Reinforcing the song’s sentiment, a study by UNSW psychologist Dr Susanne Schweizer and colleagues from the University of Cambridge, UK, found the older people get the better they are at responding positively to emotions.
The study, which is published in the Journal of Neuroscience, exposed 249 participants aged 18-88 to a series of film clips that ranged from positive (laughing baby) to negative (Rwandan genocide).
After being told to let any emotion arise naturally for half of the negative content, participants were told to try to reduce any unwanted emotions by reframing from what they saw.
“Older people seem to be able to extract positivity from the film footage, and it didn’t matter if it was positive, negative or neutral in nature,” Dr Schweizer told The Australian.
“They’ve, I guess – for lack of a better word – wizened to the world and their emotions.”
This theory is in contrast with another – the ‘Ageing Brain Model’.
“In a nutshell, (the Ageing Brain Model) says that older people simply react more positively to distress because the areas in their brain that generate negative reactions don’t function as well,” she said.
Proof that with age comes wisdom?
