Why Do Older Individuals Have Greater Control of Their Feelings?

Psychologist Susan Turk Charles talks about findings that reveal the elderly have higher emotional well-being

MAY 11, 2021

When we are young, our skills tend to improve with age and experience. But once we are well into adulthood, it may start to feel as if it’s all downhill from there. With every advancing year, we become slightly more forgetful, somewhat slower to respond, a little less energetic.

Yet there is at least one important exception: In the emotional realm, older people rule supreme.

For the past 20 years, Susan Turk Charles, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has been monitoring the shifting moods, the sense of satisfaction, the moments of contemplation and the occasional outbursts of anger, sadness and despair of people of all ages — with a special interest in how we handle and experience emotions as we grow older. She and her colleagues have found that, on average, older people have fewer but more satisfying social contacts and report higher emotional well-being.

What is the secret behind this grizzled levelheadedness? How can we make sure that as many people as possible can benefit from it? And what can it teach the young? In 2010, Charles and Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen coauthored an article on social and emotional aging in the Annual Review of Psychology. We circled back to Charles to learn more about the phenomenon and how the research has unfolded. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What makes a young scientist decide to specifically study the emotions of older people?

When I was an undergraduate, in the early ’90s, I was really interested in development. At that time, the scientific literature was saying that our personality and emotions were fully developed by the time we are 18. I heard this and thought, “Wow, the next 50 years, nothing gets better? This is it?” Then I took a class from Laura Carstensen at Stanford, and she was the first person to say that there was more development after age 18. She was finding that unlike physical fitness or cognition, where you may see slowing or declines, emotional regulation and experience are often as good, if not better, as we age. It was talking to her that got me excited about this field. I fell in love with the idea of studying a process related to aging that is not defined by a decline.

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