Monday, June 02, 2003

By Michael Woods, Post-Gazette National Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The grouchy old man stereotype took another hit yesterday with a new study showing that old people remember the good and forget the bad, while young people's brains accentuate the negative.

"We tend -- as we get older -- to do what the song said," observed the American Psychological Association, which is based in Washington and published the study. With 150,000 members, it is the world's biggest association of psychologists.

APA referred to "Accentuate the Positive," a 1940s-era tune popularized by Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters and other crooners:

"Accentuate the positive," it advised. "Eliminate the negative . . . latch on to the affirmative . . . and don't mess with Mister In-Between."

The emotional apparatus in older people is attuned to do exactly that, according to the study, which found it accentuates positive memories in ways that foster good feelings. It was done by Dr. Susan Turk Charles of the University of California at Irvine and associates at the University of California-Santa Cruz and Stanford University.

"The past decade witnessed a major shift in the way theorists view emotional functioning in old age," Charles said.

She explained that psychologists once regarded old age as a time when a person's emotional outlook deteriorated almost in step with physical health. Advancing years supposedly meant an increasingly dreary emotional outlook, less control over good and bad emotions.

It led to the popular stereotyped portrait of old people as generally grumpy, negative and bitter about the past.

"These theories, though influential, were based more on conjecture than on evidence," Charles said.

Actual studies of older people, launched in growing numbers in the 1990s, have painted a much different portrait of old age. It's a time when positive feelings occur just as often in everyday life -- and sometimes more often -- than in youth.

Charles helped pioneer an explanation, termed "socio-emotional selectivity theory." The theory contends that humans have a conscious and powerful subconscious awareness of the amount of time left in life. And it affects their emotional outlook.

With age, people become more aware of their limited time, and increasingly focus their attention on more positive memories, thoughts and activities. They're motivated to be emotionally selective, remembering the good, for instance, rather than the bad.

Brain imaging studies back the idea.

In older people, positive and negative images have an equal effect in activating the brain's emotional center. In younger people, negative images activate it more. The scans suggest that older people encode less negative information and thus remember less of it.

The new study, which included 208 people, lends support to the idea.

Researchers showed positive and negative pictures to groups of young and old people. Negative images involved scenes like graveyards, and positive images scenes from nature.

Both younger and older adults spent more time viewing negative images.

However, the younger group tended to remember the negative, and the older group the positive.

Michael Woods can be reached at mwoods@nationalpress.com or 1-202-662-7072.