Research over the past 20 years has looked at how the brain responds to emotions.
“We’re beginning to understand what happens in the brain when it’s exposed to emotional influences,” said Olga Klimecki, a researcher at Unige’s Center for Affective Sciences.
“The question is what happens next, and that is still a mystery. How does the brain switch from one emotional state to another? How do they return to their starting point? Do we get better at switching between emotional states with age? And what are the consequences for the brain if we are not good at regulating these emotional fluctuations?’ she asks.
TV fragments with suffering people
In the current research, that appeared in the magazine Nature Aging, the researchers showed short TV clips of people who were struggling emotionally due to a natural disaster or emergency.
The aim was to analyze how this affected the brains of younger and older subjects, respectively. The participants were also shown fragments with neutral content, to measure how well the brain was able to return to its normal state.
Older adults are better at regulating emotions
MRI scans of the brain showed that the brains of the elderly reacted differently from those of young people. In general, older people were better at regulating their emotions – including negative ones – than younger people and focused more on positive details.
But there are exceptions. And the researchers saw that elderly people who are easily anxious and worried and harbor negative thoughts have an increased risk of neurodegenerative disorders and dementia.
The next step is to investigate whether it is possible to prevent dementia by improving the adaptability of the brain. The team is now conducting an 18-month intervention study to investigate the effects of learning a foreign language or meditating.
Meditation as a tool?
“To expand our research, we want to compare the effects of two types of meditation: mindfulness, which involves focusing on your own feelings, and compassion meditation, which involves actively increasing your positive feelings toward others,” the researchers explain. .