 So aging is a journey that we all travel on, and like all journeys, it has an end. And this is a particular interest today because the world population is graying. At the turn of the century, about 700 million people were over the age of 60. By 2050, it'll be 2.1 billion. So what happens to us as we age? Most of the research to date has focused on the way we think and the way our bodies work. And if you look at that line on the left, that's kind of the story. Things just sort of decline as we age, starting around the age of 30. The figure to the right are a bunch of specific cognitive abilities, each of which declines. But what happens to our emotions as we age? We break that down by looking at three aspects of our emotions. Reacting, so for example, being afraid when you're threatened. Recognizing, knowing that somebody around you was afraid. And regulating, raining in that fear so it doesn't undermine your intentions and plans. Well, we bring people in and we create these situations that make them feel emotional. And when that's going on, we look under the hood and we measure what's going on in their bodies. And most of the people come into our laboratory by themselves and they come one time. But one of the things that's important about emotion is seeing how it changes in people over time. So we have a group of people who have been coming to our labs every five years for 20 years. We're taking a snapshot of their emotional lives. And what all this sort of told us about what happens to emotion as we age is that they really are two paths. The one on the left is normal aging and the one on the right we're going to call unhealthy aging. And it has to do with what happens to your brain as you age. So let's start on the left with the path of normal aging. So it's really kind of good news. Unlike that blue line which is cognitive and physical functioning, our research indicates that clearly our emotions stay quite intact if our brains are in good shape. Into our 80s and 90s, we can regulate emotion, we can have emotion, we can recognize them in other people. There's an interesting twist to this too. In some ways, this is a very unusual, we actually become stronger with age emotionally. So older people have more capacity for compassion. They respond more powerfully to the distress of others. They're really good at recasting things in a more positive light and they're particularly good at knowing what other people are feeling, especially in complex social situations. Why is this? It's because our brains, the emotional part of our brains, the ancient part is really well protected from the ravages of age. And as you know, we spend our whole lives learning about emotion. So that's the good news. Now here's the not so good news on the right hand road. That's the path of unhealthy aging. That's when our brain is injured by something like a tamping iron that went through Phineas Gages frontal lobes or through the degenerative diseases of late life that cause our brain cells to die. We're particularly interested in a disorder called frontotemporal dementia, which is not an Alzheimer's disease, quite different. It comes on earlier in life in your 50s. It moves very quickly, about five years from diagnosis to death. And it affects the part of the brains, not the part that helps us think and move, but the part that helps us feel. People with this disease can still think, they can still remember, but their emotions are affected. So they don't get disgusted anymore and they start doing disgusted things. They don't get embarrassed and they do things that embarrass other people. They don't care about their families and they have no insight that they've changed. Now families are really important in this regard because people need to be cared for as they develop these diseases. And I'm sure every person in this room is either caring for someone, has cared for someone, or will care for someone who has late life disease. We know a little bit about what this does to people. There's been a lot of research on Alzheimer's, almost no research on the other kinds of dementia. And if you think about it, if I asked you, what would be harder on you if the person you love lost their memory or lost their emotion? Well, you can think of it. It's a hard choice. So let me leave you with where we are in terms of the research and the big questions. One, how do we detect these diseases early on, slow the generation and stop them in their tracks? Can we relearn to be emotionally intact when we've been damaged by disease? How can we protect those who are caring for the people who have these disorders? And lastly, what can we do to make sure that as many of you as possible or us as possible end up on that healthy road? Thank you.