Productive Aging

Turns out getting older can be good for your emotional health. In a National Institute on Aging (NIA)-sponsored symposium on emotion regulation in older adults, James Gross, Derek Isaacowitz, Mara Mather, and Heather Urry argued that these individuals pay more attention and are more responsive to  positive stimuli (such as happy faces) than do young adults. The speakers also provided some exciting new evidence for older adults’ capabilities to potentially turn this “positivity effect” into a tool for actually changing their moods. As summarized by discussant Bob Levenson, this symposium beautifully illustrated the amazing advances the field of aging (which goes beyond just studying those over the age of 65) has developed in recent years, and these speakers touched on fundamental issues concerning how the brain processes emotion. 

In a related symposium also sponsored by NIA on new interventions for productive aging, researchers Denise Park, Cindy Lustig, Arthur Kramer, and Elizabeth Stine-Morrow  presented an array of intervention research projects, on cognitive training and physical exercise to broad lifestyle enrichment, that could have major public health implications.  There are lots of products on the market that promise to promote better cognitive functioning, but the trick is transfer – does improvement in one specific skill transfer to similar gains in others?  In many instances it doesn’t, but there’s much promising research into new interventions that attempt to do just that.  The highlight of the session was the special guest of honor, speaker Arthur Kramer’s 89-year-old aunt, a retired biochemistry professor at UC Berkeley, who Kramer bragged was the “perfect example of productive aging.”

-Amy Pollick