How ageing brains cope with emotion
Have you ever wondered what exactly triggers why we become sad, disappointed or angry? Scientists at the University in Reading in Britain are determined to answer this question. The university has been awarded funding to examine how our brains deal with emotion as we age.
Have you ever wondered what exactly triggers why we become sad, disappointed or angry? Scientists at the University in Reading in Britain are determined to answer this question.
The university has been awarded funding to examine how our brains deal with emotion as we age, with the results hopefully helping to “breakdown misunderstandings” about mental health and ageing.
Lead researcher, Dr Carien van Reekum, adds he hopes the research will teach governments how to “maintain levels of wellbeing among an ageing population”.
“The issue of later life wellbeing is key to lessen the burden on long-term health care, lower the impact of later-life depression and promote continued involvement in society by the elderly.
“While we know a great deal about how our brains ‘shrink’ as we get older – affecting abilities such as memory, attention, planning and movement – little is known about how they impact our emotional wellbeing,” he says.
Researchers will use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of volunteers aged 55 to 85 years, as well as a control group of younger people, while measuring their physiological and behavioural responses to emotion regulation tasks.
Researchers will then analyse the data to see how individuals whose brains have deteriorated with age compensate by activating their brains differently when regulating emotion, and examine how people’s ability to regulate emotion, even in the face of decline in cognitive ability and brain matter, affects people’s stress levels and wellbeing.
