Seniors Brings Stability to the Work Force

BussinessWeek
July 2008 

Older employees may be an asset when businesses are hit with bad news. A study from the University of Alberta found that as we get older, we get better at rerouting worrisome information to areas of the brain that can process it analytically. Older people are thus “less affected by upsetting situations,” says University of Alberta psychiatrist Florin ­Dolcos, who led the study. Dolcos and his team showed disturbing images to groups of younger and older people, scanning their brains as they reacted. The older subjects (average age, 70) more actively sent the potentially distressing data from the brain’s amygdala (the seat of emotion) to the anterior cingulate cortex (involved in emotion control). They also rated the images as less “negative” than younger participants did.

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