About

Maggie Steber was an only child. Madje Steber was a single parent. They were all the family they had and it wasn’t easy.

Madje divorced when Maggie was only six months old. Strong and independent, Madje raised her daughter in the small Texas town of Electra, near the Oklahoma border. She had a keen awareness of what others might be thinking of a young single mother at a time when that was often viewed as a scarlet letter. Their tiny house had strict rules and a formality that rubbed Maggie the wrong way, especially during her teenage years. Their relationship was strained with arguments and threats to move out. At the age of twenty-one, Maggie finally did.

“I wanted to leave, I had to leave,” Maggie says. “I went to New York to find my fortune, and there I found it.”

That fortune was as an internationally acclaimed photojournalist. She covered everything from fashion to war and completed stories in 62 different countries. She worked routinely for National Geographic, was the Director of Photography for the Miami Herald and taught at various universities and workshops.

As the years passed and Madje grew older, her memory began to fade. Maggie tried to help, but her busy career kept her away from Texas. She was only was able to visit a few times year. To this day, Maggie wonders if she did enough for her aging mother. Eventually it became apparent, Madje had dementia.

The disease proved relentless and Madje could not live alone anymore. Maggie was faced with an issue that more and more Americans must deal with as the massive baby-boomer population grows older. Maggie moved her mother to Miami to care for her. “This is my last chance to do it right,” Maggie says.

Over the next few years, Maggie turned her professional eye on her own life, documenting Madje’s life in an assisted living facility. The images speak to the pain of loss, the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship and the fragility of life. They reveal beauty in a liberation from the roles Maggie and Madje had learned to play as mother and daughter. They speak to both the harsh and humorous realities of life with a diminished parent and contain lessons for all of us as we face these issues in our own lives.

“This body of work is the most important one I have ever done,” says Maggie, “and will ever do. It’s Madje’s story, but really and truly, it’s my story.”

ᔥ Mediastorm

In a discovery that could help in the identification and treatment of anxiety disorders, Michigan State University scientists say the brains of anxious girls work much harder than those of boys.

 
The finding stems from an experiment in which college students performed a relatively simple task while their brain activity was measured by an electrode cap. Only girls who identified themselves as particularly anxious or big worriers recorded high brain activity when they made mistakes during the task.

Jason Moser, lead investigator on the project, said the findings may ultimately help mental health professionals determine which girls may be prone to anxiety problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder.

“This may help predict the development of anxiety issues later in life for girls,” said Moser, assistant professor of psychology. “It’s one more piece of the puzzle for us to figure out why women in general have more anxiety disorders.”

The study, reported in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, is the first to measure the correlation between worrying and error-related brain responses in the sexes using a scientifically viable sample (79 female students, 70 males). [continue reading…]

By Paul Frijters, University of Queensland and Tony Beatton, Queensland University of Technology

People are at their happiest at retirement age and their most miserable in their geriatric years, according to a study we published recently in the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation. Our findings effectively debunk the myth of middle-aged blues and show how happiness levels vary widely over a person’s lifespan.

 

We all strive towards happiness to achieve a sense of fulfilment in our lives. But there is also an economic reason to advocate this goal. Happier people tend to be healthier than those who are unhappy; and mentally unhealthy people are costly.

According to the Department of Health and Ageing and beyondblue, depression treatment costs the Australian community more than $600 million each year. It’s expected depression will be second only to heart disease as the leading medical cause of death and disability within the next 20 years.

Existing ideas of happiness

The notion that happiness is U-shaped over a person’s lifetime has gained a lot of momentum over the past decade. The U-shape of the happiness myth goes something like this: we were happy in our youth, became more miserable in our mid-40s, only to have happiness return in our late-50s. We then confront an inevitable happiness decline as our health fails in our late-70s and beyond.

Previous research supporting the U-shape model of happiness incorrectly assumed that life factors (such as level of income, education, marital status and health) remained constant over a lifetime. And rather than following an individual over many years to see how happy they are at different ages, researchers studied various groups of people at different stages of their lives whilst inappropriate presuming they shared the same characteristics.

New research

Our research interrogated the U-shape of happiness theory by examining how happiness levels changed in a sample of 60,000 people in Australia, Britain, and Germany, over many years.

We accounted for statistical limitations such as character traits and availability. This is important because being part of a study isn’t a random event: those who are busier (and perhaps happier in their middle-aged years) are less likely to take part in these studies. But happier (and therefore healthier) older people who have more time on their hands are more likely to be involved.

Hence the previous economic studies over-estimated the misery in mid-life and under-estimated it for very old people who were too sick to respond.

Unexpectedly, there was also the matter of increased honesty: Germans who were surveyed ten years in a row were significantly less happy than Germans interviewed at the beginning and end of the same period. The more a German talked, the unhappier she seemed to become; the dominant interpretation is that she became more honest about her true feelings and kept up a facade earlier on.

A similar thing occurs in Britain, but to a lesser degree. Australians had no such tendency. Correcting for both selectivity and dishonest reporting, we arrived at the wave-like profile below (click on the magnifying glass to zoom).

Our findings appear more in the line with the large body of psychological literature on the issue: there are no middle-age blues. Happiness is level through from about the age of 20 to retirement age (55 to 60), peaking at age 65 to 70 for Australians, then dropping increasingly fast as death approaches (80 to 90).

The same was found in Britain and Germany, though the happiness wave among the retired was far more pronounced there than elsewhere.

What’s next for happiness research?

One of the frontiers is how to promote happy personalities, which turn out to be extroverted personalities. Extroverts cope better with life shocks and are thus less stressed.

But how do we increase extroversion?

The short answer is we don’t know. Though the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) of Professor Martin Seligman and his team at the University of Pennsylvania have been experimenting with telling school children how great they are, stimulating them to be open and extroverted. There are no results yet from these studies, but the idea is to look at whether we can educate children to be extroverted, and therefore happier, by stimulating their creativity and willingness to speak out.

Happiness policy is a relatively new concept in our society and we are only just getting used to the idea that it is something valid for our governments to worry about. We want our children to grow up as happy adults so we need to promote happy personality traits.

Meanwhile it is comforting to know that the happiest years come after retirement! Something to look forward to rather than dread.

Paul Frijters received ARC funding to do this work.

Tony Beatton does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

ᔥThis article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.