Apes have midlife crises too

 
Human behaviour studies have revealed the well-established trend that our level of happiness declines after childhood until middle age, when we gradually begin to feel more content again.

Now researchers have found that the same "u-shaped" pattern is also seen among chimpanzees and orang-utans, who are most satisfied with life in their earliest and latest years but reach a "nadir" in middle age.

While it may be tempting for balding Ferrari drivers to blame their affliction on the stresses of modern life, their findings suggest that the midlife crisis may be ingrained in our genes.

Prof Andrew Oswald of Warwick University said: "We hoped to understand a famous scientific puzzle: why does human happiness follow an approximate U-shape through life?

"We ended up showing that it cannot be because of mortgages, marital break-up, mobile phones, or any of the other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of those."

The researchers examined behavioural reports on more than 500 captive apes compiled by their keepers, researchers or other volunteers who were familiar with them throughout their lives.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, they reported that the animals' happiness was generally high in youth, declined in middle age and rose again into old age.
While the study does not rule out the influence of cultural forces on our mood, it suggests biological factors could partly explain the distinctive u-shaped pattern.
Possible explanations could be that happiness is linked to longevity – meaning that the humans and apes who live longest are likely to be the happiest – or that brain changes as we age influence our well-being.
A third explanation could be that older humans and apes spend more time doing things that they enjoy, or set themselves more attainable goals in order to feel more satisfied, researchers said.
 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/