The Roller Coaster of Emotion

Emotion is such a central part of life that we as humans often take it for granted. From the moment you open your eyes as a baby, you have some sense of happiness or sadness, fear or love. Even animals feel emotion, despite old wives’ tales that like to make it seem like emotion is uniquely human. 

As I said before, we tend to take emotion for granted. But after reading this article, I hope you will all think we really shouldn’t, because we might not be able to experience the same things the same ways when we get older. This is because the part of our brain that handles emotion, like the rest of our body after 90 years, will begin to show the consequences of a lifetime of use. 

BUT! Like with all my other articles, it’s not a simple “this part of the brain gets better/worse with age.” While sometimes that may be true, there’s usually more to the story than that. That being said, the purpose of this article is to not to give you an answer, but to promote understanding. So here we go!

The spotlight of this article is on a small structure nestled deep in the brain called the amygdala. “Amygdala” comes from the Latin word for almond, because it looks like an almond and our Western ancestors in scientific fields weren’t very creative. The amygdala is known as the center of all emotion, but it’s especially important in emotional memory, through connections to the hippocampus, the “memory center” of the brain. When we’re young, the amygdala-hippocampus connection is super strong, and is activated every time we experience emotion, so that the experience can be stored into memory. For example, this connection is the reason we feel safe in our mother’s arms, or why we smile at the sight of an old teddy bear. On the flip side, it’s also why some of us experience a lot of trauma-related memory, which can mean anything from a small fear of heights to a crippling social phobia where the person feels like they can never leave their home. 

It’s pretty well known in the neuroscientific world that people tend to remember negative things more than positive ones. For example, imagine Matt, a high school boy. Matt is generally a pretty good student, volunteers at the hospital, and is always willing to help other kids who are struggling in class, but one day he starts acting obnoxiously and ends up getting sent to the principal’s office for poor behavior. Years later, a huge majority of Matt’s classmates are only going to remember Matt as the kid who pissed off the teacher, not the kid who helped other kids in class or the kid who volunteered at the hospital three times a week. 

That’s a pretty typical memory for someone younger than 50. But somewhere in mid-life, the amygdala-hippocampus connection starts to get thinner and weaker. Negative memories stop “sticking” in the brain, and older adults tend to remember only positive memories. This is called the “positivity effect,” which happens naturally with age. 

But why does this happen? Well, through fMRI studies (these are studies that use a machine that can create a visual picture of someone’s brain without actually cutting them open with a knife) on many people, researchers found the amygdala-hippocampus connection starts to disappear when we age, and instead, older people have a new amygdala connection: the dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (brain areas near the front of the brain, whereas the hippocampus is in the middle of the brain). These areas are known to be important in emotion regulation and older adults actually seem to be able to manage their emotions better. What this means in the real world is that older people might be able to control their emotions through cognitive reappraisal, which is the healthy kind of emotional control, as opposed to expressive suppression, which is basically “bottling up” your feelings and can be very harmful in the long run. 

That was a lot of information, wasn’t it? Let’s do a quick recap of everything we learned. The amygdala is the emotion center of the brain, and it changes quite a bit with age, but its change is not a simple “oh it got bigger” or “oh it got smaller.” Older adults might forget a lot of things, but the “positivity effect” means they tend to only forget the bad things, but they’ll still remember most of the good things. Not to mention, older people are (theoretically) better at controlling their emotions than younger people, or at least they are able to do it through healthier and more effective means. 

— Allie Yuxin Lin