Scientists have acknowledged that it’s not just us humans that suffer from midlife crises – apes do too. Except the apes might not go out and buy a Harley, or take up golf on their own accord.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, the researchers, who studied the behavioural reports of 508 chimpanzees and orang-utans, were able to conclude that like humans, some of the great apes follow the same “u-shaped” life satisfaction pattern that us humans do.

Essentially, these apes are most satisfied with life in their earliest and latest years, but reach a plateau in middle age.

Zookeepers across 65 zoos were asked to rate ape happiness, and asked questions like: were the apes in good moods? Were they deriving pleasure from socialising, and whether they achieved their goals.

Prof Andrew Oswald of Warwick University said:

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 break-up, mobile phones, or any of the other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of those.

Biology and physiology have to be at the top of a list of possible explanations. That’s what we share in common.

The study does not rule out cultural forces – for instance, how an ape is treated – but it suggests that biological factors are partly to blame. It also suggests that apes that do things that make them happy, could mean an overall happier ape, over time.

One criticism however, is that the study could have benefited from using less subjective measures such as perceiving how an ape felt, when the zookeeper couldn’t actually speak chimp or orang-utan, and just decided this on behalf of the ape.

[Source: LiveScience]