They can be happy...
They can be sad...
They can enjoy peaceful moments...
And according to a recent study, they can also experience midlife crisis.
So, I went to the Medicine.net site and looked it up. A "midlife crisis" is defined as "A period of personal emotional turmoil and coping challenges that some people encounter when they reach middle age, accompanied by a desire for change in their lives, brought on by fears and anxieties about growing older. "
For humans, this phenomenon can happen anytime around the age of 45 until we are either old enough to have gained wisdom and find a renewed sense of wellbeing or too old to remember what we were feeling unhappy about. (I started at 12, hoping the rest of my life would be a cruise but I haven't gained enough wisdom to end it yet.)
Since I am not a psychologist, my understanding of the cause of this change some of us are doomed to go through is very simplified and probably would cause more than one experts to tear their hair out. Anyway, we start young and enthusiastic, we go through many many challenges, realize we don't control our fate the way we thought we could magically do it when we were 10 and BLAH, midlife crisis is here! That's because as Jung put it so eloquently: "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what in the morning was true will in evening become a lie."
From what I read here and there in popular magazines, it seems that the causes for a midlife crisis vary from person to person, it can be a tragic life event or simply boredom, aging, hormonal changes (andropause / menopause).
It is the same for great apes?
The authors of a paper published this month and entitled "Evidence for a "Midlife Crisis" in Great Apes Consistent with the U-Shape in Human Well-Being" find that the causes maybe rooted in biology more than in economic and sociological factors. They explain that, based on studies conducted over 20 years all over the world, there is strong evidence that human happiness follows a U-shape with the most happiness early and late in life and the lowest point in midlife for both males and females. The authors conducted well-being surveys of 508 aging great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans) in zoos and sanctuaries in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Singapore and Australia. All were rated on their moods, social interactions, activity level and well-being by keepers who knew them for at least 2 years. All displayed signs of midlife crisis between the ages of 28 and 35. This is the first study on well-being conducted with non-human primates. If socioeconomic factors are not the only ones playing a role in midlife crisis, then biological and evolutionary factors must be at play. Why do apes (like humans) get happier again later in life? If unhappy apes die sooner than other better adjusted apes their age, this could explain a higher level of well-being with the older population. It is also possible both apes and humans experience age-related changes in the brain areas associated with well-being the same way. The authors' suggestion is to conduct studies in the area of neurodevelopment shared by humans and great apes.
Click here to check out the University of Warwick press release and download the article in PDF format.
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