According to a recent study published in Nature, the emotional health of elderly individuals is rock solid. However, little is known about how people cope with and recover from socially detrimental situations. To do this, researchers devised a “task-rest” paradigm in which 182 participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching movies meant to induce various emotions during two sessions.
The experiment confirmed the task in both younger and older individuals, demonstrating that age substantially influences brain activity and connection, particularly after viewing a negative social situation. Only in the elderly did emotional elicitation improve resting-state connectivity between the default mode network and the amygdala.
Alterations in the link between the posterior default mode network and the amygdala were shown to be related to anxiety, rumination, and negative thoughts in a second experiment with a larger sample of older people. These findings shed light on the neurobiology of empathy-related processes in the elderly and the link between advancing years and poor recovery from social stress.
There are several ways that old age can influence a person. Even though the old do less well physically and intellectually than younger individuals, their emotional functions appear to be preserved or even improved. Elders have mastered the skill of emotional control, which is essential for living a meaningful and healthy life (. People our age have a “positivity bias” in emotional perception and value friendship and love more than their younger colleagues.
Anxiety, depression, concern, and rumination, on the other hand, are related to less efficient emotion regulation and more illogical emotional responses, particularly in old age. Maladaptive emotional styles may lead to dementia, a severe health problem. But how the brains of emotionally healthy and socially proficient adults operate remains a mystery.
It’s possible that “emotional inertia,” or the tendency for feelings to persist from one situation to the next, is caused by a maladaptive affective style. Since it is related to an elevated risk of depression and higher trait anxiety and ruminative tendencies, emotional inertia may suggest insufficient coping mechanisms in the aftermath of affective experiences and a lack of resilience to stress.
Recent neuroimaging studies on emotional inertia have employed ‘task-rest’ paradigms, in which brain activity is investigated during active stimuli processing and spontaneous post-task resting periods during brain homeostasis. The images or videos aroused pleasant or negative emotions, which demonstrated long-term effects on brain activity and connections during rest. The timing, activity (passive watching-active control of emotions ), valence, and degree of the emotion may all modulate these effects.
Emotional carryover effects often influence the functional dynamics of the default mode network (DMN) via increased or decreased activity patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), precuneus, and inferior parietal cortex. When people are free to explore their brains, this part of the default mode network (DMN) becomes active. The insula and amygdala, two brain areas involved in emotional and social processing, have shown similar results.
The longer it took for the amygdala to recuperate after watching emotionally draining movies, the more nervous and ruminative the viewer became. Throughout recovery from unpleasant emotions and rewards, subcortical limbic regions, including the amygdala and striatum, show long-term changes in functional links with cortical areas in the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and posterior cingulate cortex. The long-term effects of emotions on the activity and connectivity of limbic networks may be an essential brain metric of emotional regulation style and affective resilience.
However, most studies on memory retention have focused on teens or young adults. There is a recognized “positivity effect” in the elderly compared to younger adults. Still, it is uncertain if emotional inertia grows with age and how aging affects the functional dynamics of the default mode network (DMN) in affective settings.
Elderly persons have better DMN connection with cognitive-related prefrontal regions34 than younger people and do not deactivate the DMN during externally directed cognitive tasks. However, little is known about how the DMN’s emotional responses change with age and how they could be linked to other cognitive or social-affective capacities.
Furthermore, variations in empathy may significantly alter responses to traumatic social and emotional events and even the likelihood of recovery. Because their social abilities are often still highly keen, older individuals make excellent research subjects. Although there is rising evidence that cognitive empathy declines with age, there is mounting evidence that affective empathy and altruistic acts remain stable or even improve with age.
When exposed to the pain of others, however, the regions of the brain involved in pain processing, negative emotion, and salience detection—the anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—show diminished reactivity. On the other hand, empathy has increased activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), which are connected with the Theory of Mind and perspective-taking.
However, even though social connections and emotional resilience are essential for healthy aging, the brain substrates underlying recovery from unpleasant events, and their association with empathy capacities, personality, and psycho-affective traits have not been studied in older people.
