Scientists set out to find why people get sadder in the middle of their lives and happier in later portion, the answer they found though only makes the question more complicated. The scientists made the shocking discovery that great apes, like humans, will go through the classic “Mid life crisis” stage like many humans do. Scientists have confirmed that Great Apes go through a stage where they get much sadder during the middle of their lives and get happier gain as they get older. This amazing find has shown that we have even more in common with great apes than we’ve previously thought.
- The study was done on 500 great apes and showed that they had very similar patterns of well being as humans had.
- This shows us that the “Mid life crisis” stage has a deep, natural aspect in humans.
- To find how out happy the apes were scientist would develop an “ape questionnaire” where an animal’s keepers would observe their moods and how often they socialized, at different stages of the apes lives.
- “We hoped to understand a famous scientific puzzle: why does human happiness follow an approximate U-shape through life? We ended up showing that it cannot be because of mortgages, marital breakup, mobile phones, or any other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of these”- co-author Andrew J. Oswald
Want to read more? Read the full story here: Great apes suffer mid-life crisis too