Psychologists are finding that there is one thing that improves as we age - our outlook. Sutdies show that as we age, we are more balanced in the way we process emotional information.

Research at the University of Colorado was conducted that studied the way people of different ages reacted to emotionally charged images. The images were viewed for a few seconds only while brain reaction was monitored. Participants clicked a mouse to register which category these images fell into.

The results showed that younger adults pay more attention to emotionally negative images than positive ones. The 55+ age group had different results.

“But the new finding from our study was that the older adults, ages 55 plus, didn’t show this so-called ‘negative bias.’ Instead they tended to show a better balance between paying attention to both negative and positive images.”

The article, Looking at the Sunny Side of Life: Age-Related Change in a Event-Related Potential Measure of the Negativity Bias, is published in the journal Psychological Science.

Getting older provides positive outlook

When psychologists first began developing interventions for chronic back pain sufferers, the goal was to help patients learn to live with their pain and still lead productive lives. But new evidence indicates that psychological intervention actually reduces pain for these patients.

In a review appearing in the January issue of Health Psychology lead author Robert Kerns, Phd.D. of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System details the benefits of psychological interventions in the treatment of patients with chronic back pain.

Although rehabilitation programs that include a psychological component can be more effective than costly surgical interventions, health insurers are less willing to pay for them.

“We need to specifically target health care system administrators and third-party payers to try to engage them in a more productive dialogue about the importance of these interventions,” Kerns said. “We continue to have a huge, very costly problem in our society, but we have an intervention that is effective, and we need to do a better job of creating access to these services.”