Neurologically speaking, is youth is wasted on the young?

Via eide neurlearning comes this intresting fMRI study on age-based neuro responses to positive and negative information (events, faces, places etc.) Turns out younger people have more affinity for "encoding," or processing, negative stumuli than older adults....

Columbia.edu [pdf] ABSTRACT—As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults....

The improved affective experience seen in old age stands in sharp contrast to the many physical and cognitive declines associated with aging. This improved emotional experience may be associated with changes in the way emotional information is initially processed and later remembered. For example, when pairs of faces are presented, older adults are less likely to attend to negative than to neutral or positive faces (Mather & Carstensen, 2003). Whether remembering pictures, options related to a recent decision, or their own emotional experiences, older adults remember relatively less emotionally negative information and relatively more emotionally positive information compared with younger adults...

It is unknown what neural mechanisms might be associated with these age-associated changes in emotion processing. Because of its central role in emotional attention and memory, however, the amygdala is a region of particular interest .... With age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information.

Lots of neuroscience jargon mixed in but it does ponder some interesting ideas:

According to socioemotional selectivity theory... boundaries on time (in the case of aging, life expectancy) shift goals. When time is perceived as expansive, as it typically is in youth, acquiring information and expanding horizons are prioritized. When constraints on time are perceived, as is typically the case in old age, negative experiences are no longer useful investments in the future. Emotion regulation becomes a higher priority, and older people appear to diminish the processing of negative information that might reduce positive affect.

So, in youth pessimism and discrimination based on negation are the method for assessing our world. (Maybe this is why my kids ignore my smiling, calm-parent pleadings and get up off their butts when I use the "ogre" method?) But, as we age, our assessments broaden to include a fuller range of feeling and identity.

They didn't use it as an example, but what do you want to bet a baby's face counted amongst those positive images. And maybe a family meal, or the Statue of Liberty. Or flattering Fortune 500 articles or Inc Magazine's "Best places to work."

Say, hello...