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Why Older Adults Are HappierRachael Rettner, MyHealthNewsDaily Senior Writer | May 29, 2013 01:58pm ET

WASHINGTON— People tend to get happier as they age, and a new study could explain why:

Older adults may be better able to deal with negative emotions like anger and anxiety.

In the study, older adults were less likely than younger adults to feel angry and anxious in their

everyday lives, as well as when they were asked to perform a stressful task.

In addition, older adults scored higher on a test designed to measure how well participants accept

their negative emotions. The researchers call this trait "acceptance," or a tendency to be in touch

with rather than avoid negative emotions.

The results may explain a paradox that's been seen in many other studies: Despite declines in

physical and mental health, older adults are happier  than young or middle-age adults. [5 Reasons

 Aging Is Awesome] 

Younger people could take advantage of the findings to experience more happiness well before

they grow old, said study researcher Iris Mauss, a psychologist and assistant professor at the

University of California, Berkeley.

"Acceptance is good for anyone," Mauss said. "It just seems to be the case that older people use it

more than younger people. They're sort of wise to it."

The study involved 340 adults ages 21 to 73 who rated their anger andanxiety levels each day

over a two-week period, and before and after they were required to give an on-camera speech

with little time to prepare.

Participants also rated statements to gauge their level of emotional acceptance, such as "I tell

myself I shouldn't be feeling the way that I'm feeling," and "I think some of my emotions are bad or

inappropriate and I shouldn't feel them." (Participants who said that these statements were "very

often true" would be considered to have lower acceptance.)

The researchers don't know why the ability to accept negative emotions gets better with age. But

one idea is that, as people grow old, they experience more life events that are out of their control,

such as disease and the death of loved ones. With more of these life experiences, people may

learn that it is futile to try to control such events, and that there are things that they need to accept,

Mauss said.

The study was presented here at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science

on May 24. It was published in the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Follow Rachael Rettner  @RachaelRettner . Follow

MyHealthNewsDaily  @MyHealth_MHND,Facebook  & Google+. Originally published

on LiveScience. 

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Does Happiness Increase As We GetOlder?By Fred Cicetti, Contributing writer | August 02, 2013 01:58pm ET

"The Healthy Geezer" answers questions about health and aging in his weekly column. 

Question: Do we get sadder as we get older?

Answer : It seems that just the opposite is true. There's a lot of evidence that we get happier the

older  we get.

 A Gallup telephone poll of 340,000 people across the U.S. showed that happiness comes with

age. However, the poll didn't uncover the cause of this phenomenon.

Dr. Arthur A. Stone, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook,

was the lead author of a study based on the Gallup survey. He speculated on the causes for this

happiness. 

"It could be that there are environmental changes, or it could be psychological changes about the

way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine

changes," Dr. Stone told the New York Times in 2010.

The telephone survey included people between 18 and 85. The survey showed that people startout at age 18 feeling pretty good. However, they feel progressively worse until they hit 50.

But after that point, people begin getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are

even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

Why are older people happier? I collected some theories. Older people are happier because they

have:

   A deeper appreciation of the value of life

   A feeling of fulfillment

   A greater ability to understand and handle life's vicissitudes

  Fewer aspirations and expectations of themselves

  The ability to live in the present and not worry about the future 

  The wisdom to know they can't please everyone all the time

   An inclination to see situations more positively

 A University of Chicago study also showed that happiness increases with age. The researchers

asked a cross section of Americans how happy they were. The question was administered in face-

to-face interviews of population samples that ranged from about 1,500 to 3,000.

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The Chicago researchers theorized that older people are happier because with age comes

positive psychosocial traits, such as self-integration and self-esteem; these signs of maturity could

contribute to a better sense of overall well-being.

"Older people are better able to recognize what will bother them, and better able to negotiate their

environment," said Susan Turk Charles, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine.

One study looked at people's positive and negative emotions over the course of 23 years, and

compared participants by age group. Researchers found that teenagers most frequently reported

negative emotions, while octogenarians seemed to feel the least negative.

If you would like to read more columns, you can order a copy of "How to be a Healthy Geezer"

at www.healthygeezer.com. 

 All rights reserved © 2013 by Fred Cicetti