“The really frightening thing about middle age,” the actor Doris Day is said to have joked, “is that you know you'll grow out of it.” We may bravely try to claim that life begins at 40- but for many people，it can feel more like the beginning of the end.
Mid life wasn't always seen this way. It isn't clear why we have a more negative view today, but Margie Lachman, director of the lifespan development lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, suggests it may be linked to the pressures that begin piling up in our 30s. “Midlife is a period of high stress today, more so than in the past,” she says. “One is exactly in the middle of work and family careers. This can affect one's ability to focus on one's own well-being.”
There are, however, many reasons to feel positive about this crucial period. In a series of experiments, Laura Germine at Harvard Medical School has tested tens of thousands of people to examine the differences in cognitive abilities between age groups. Germine's studies have included the famous “mind in the eyes” test, for instance, which gets people to infer emotional states from small differences in facial expressions. She found that people in their late 40s scored highest. This may be due to practice, she suggests. “When you think about the amount of social differences that one has to learn across the lifespan- that's where we think that comes from.”
Germine found similar patterns in a task demanding continuous attention. In this, the participants had to watch different scenes fade into one another and adapt their response according to what they saw-pressing a button when they saw a city and releasing it when they saw a mountain. 40-somethings found it much easier to “get into the zone” than younger people.
It is interesting to note that middle-aged people frequently bring in the most supplies in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. According to various studies, hunter-gatherers often take decades to learn their skills, and these abilities continue to grow into their 40s.
There are some downsides to hitting this age, of course. Our skin tends to become loose and our body fat starts to be redistributed around the midriff. But after a drop in life satisfaction, happiness is already set to rise at the end of this decade and the beginning of the next.
Contrary to popular opinion, humans seem to have evolved to flourish into middle age and beyond.
【小题1】What can we infer from the first paragraph?| A．Doris Day felt excited in her 40s. | B．It's believed that life begins at 40. |
| C．Lots of people feel worried at 40. | D．We are supposed to be braver at 40. |
| A．People in their 40s attach more importance to their well-being. |
| B．There seem to be reasons for us to be optimistic about middle age. |
| C．The participants in their 40s did badly in Germine's experiments. |
| D．Humans' physical appearance definitely gets worse in their 40s. |
| A．Succeed | B．Panic | C．Calm | D．Decline |
| A．A textbook | B．An art review. |
| C．A science magazine. | D．A biography. |
