2006
DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0022-06.2006
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The Mellow Years?: Neural Basis of Improving Emotional Stability over Age

Abstract: Contrary to the pervasive negative stereotypes of human aging, emotional functions may improve with advancing age. However, the brain mechanisms underlying changes in emotional function over age remain unknown. Here, we demonstrate that emotional stability improves linearly over seven decades (12-79 years) of the human lifespan. We used both functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related potential recording to examine the neural basis of this improvement. With these multimodal techniques, we show that… Show more

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Cited by 262 publications
(288 citation statements)
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“…Because much of the aging literature highlights age-related changes and impairments to the structure and function of prefrontal cortex (Cabeza, 2002;Park & Gutchess, 2004;Raz, 2000;Reuter-Lorenz & Lustig, 2005), the finding of intact function with aging is somewhat surprising. Moreover, the few studies to investigate functional changes in medial prefrontal cortex identify changes with age, such as reduced suppression when tasks require an external focus (Grady et al, 2006;Lustig et al, 2003), and for emotion regulation, increases or decreases with age, depending on the valence of the stimuli (Williams et al, 2006). While the response of the region may be impaired with age when tasks require suppression (Grady et al, 2006;Lustig et al, 2003) or controlled processing (Williams et al, 2006), our results suggest that the response of the medial prefrontal cortex is intact with age when the region is crucially engaged by the task.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
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“…Because much of the aging literature highlights age-related changes and impairments to the structure and function of prefrontal cortex (Cabeza, 2002;Park & Gutchess, 2004;Raz, 2000;Reuter-Lorenz & Lustig, 2005), the finding of intact function with aging is somewhat surprising. Moreover, the few studies to investigate functional changes in medial prefrontal cortex identify changes with age, such as reduced suppression when tasks require an external focus (Grady et al, 2006;Lustig et al, 2003), and for emotion regulation, increases or decreases with age, depending on the valence of the stimuli (Williams et al, 2006). While the response of the region may be impaired with age when tasks require suppression (Grady et al, 2006;Lustig et al, 2003) or controlled processing (Williams et al, 2006), our results suggest that the response of the medial prefrontal cortex is intact with age when the region is crucially engaged by the task.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The one study that has examined this issue found that, during processing of emotional facial expressions, older adults recruit less medial prefrontal cortex when viewing happy faces and more when viewing angry faces, compared to younger adults (Williams et al, 2006). Because emotion regulation ability is known to improve with aging (Gross et al, 1997) it is perhaps unsurprising that older adults would show differential medial prefrontal recruitment.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Converging evidence supports the link between this motivational shift and age-related changes in how we recognize and process emotional stimuli (GunningDixon et al, 2003;Iidaka et al, 2002;Jacques, Dolcos, & Cabeza, 2008;Kisley, Wood, & Burrows, 2007;Mather et al, 2004;Williams et al, 2006). For instance, Williams and colleagues (2006) analyzed the recognition of fearful, happy and neutral facial expressions from 12 to 79 years of age using behavioral, neurophysiological and neuroimaging methods.…”
Section: Emotion Recognition In Music Changes Across the Adult Life Spanmentioning
confidence: 98%
“…Based on previous findings by Laukka and Juslin (2007), Paulmann et al (2008) and Williams et al (2006), we hypothesized that advancing age would be associated with emotion-specific changes in recognition, specifically an age-related decrease in responsiveness to the negative emotions of sadness and fear/threat, and stability for the positive emotions of happiness and peacefulness. Based on the finding that musicians perform better than non-musicians in emotion recognition tasks (Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2004), we also investigated the correlation between years of music training of the participants (controlled a posteriori) with accuracy on a derived measure of accuracy.…”
Section: Emotion Recognition In Music Changes Across the Adult Life Spanmentioning
confidence: 99%
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