Old monkeys and old humans get pickier, less social and crankier

Angela

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I don't know if we needed a study to tell us about humans but interesting that monkeys exhibit the same behavior, so there may be a biological component.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/science/old-monkeys-picky-behavior.html

"“This clearly tells us that we, as humans, are not unique in the way we age socially but that there might be an evolutionary ‘deep’ root in this pattern,” said Alexandra Freund, a developmental psychologist at the University of Zurich who worked on the study published in Current Biology."

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Perhaps monkeys and humans just lose stamina with age, and maybe the monkeys are too tired to deal with relationships that are ambivalent or negative, she added. Or maybe, as the researchers are now trying to investigate, aging monkeys are less socially interactive because they tend to take fewer risks, which is what appears to happen in humansaccording to some research."

Sounds reasonable to me.

It's one reason why waiting to have children until you're in your thirties may not be such a good idea. By the time you have grandchildren, you just may not have the stamina to become babysitter in chief.


 
Other causes of crankier state could be ailing bodies with constant discomfort and pain. Plus, aging brains are losing conscious control of behaviour with primal instincts playing bigger role, like anger and aggression.
To be pickier could be a function of experience. With age and experience we know exactly what we want and what we don't want.
Also with age people become more conservative for some reason. Perhaps for the mentioned reasons of being cranky, less social and picky?
 
Primal instincts kick in when there's not enough caffeine in the bloodstream; at least in my case...
 

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