“The consistency was really striking,” said Dilip Jeste, director of the UC San Diego Center for Healthy Aging and senior author of the study. “People who were in older life were happier, more satisfied, less depressed, had less anxiety and less perceived stress than younger respondents.”
The results were published Wednesday in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
Experts on the psychology of aging say the new findings add to a growing body of research that suggests there are emotional benefits to getting older.
“In the literature it’s called the paradox of aging,” said Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, who was not involved in the work. “How can it be that given the many well-documented losses that occur with age, we also see this improvement in emotional well-being?”
As it happens, Carstensen does not think this is a paradox at all.