This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Old age may not sound exciting. But recent findings offer good news for older people and for people about getting older.

Researchers found that people become happier and experience less worry after they the age of fifty. In fact, they say by the age of eighty-five, people are happier with their life than they were when they were eighteen years old.

The findings came from a of more than three hundred forty thousand adults in the United States. The Gallup Organization questioned them by telephone in two thousand eight. At that time, the people were between the ages of eighteen and eighty-five.

The researchers asked questions about like happiness, sadness and worry. They also asked about mental or emotional stress.

Arthur Stone in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University in New York led the study. His team found that levels of stress were among adults between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five.

The findings showed that stress levels dropped after people reached their fifties.

Happiness was highest among the youngest adults and those in their early seventies. The people likely to report feeling negative emotions were those in their seventies and eighties.

The study also showed that men and women have similar emotional as they grow older. However, women at all ages reported more sadness, stress and worry than men.

The findings appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers say they do not know why happiness increases as people get older. One theory is that, as people grow older, they grow more for what they have and have better control of their emotions. They also spend less time thinking about bad experiences.

Professor Stone says the emotional patterns could be to changes in how people see the world, or maybe even changes in brain .

The researchers also considered possible influences like having young children, being unemployed or being single. But they found that influences like these did not affect the levels of happiness and well-being related to age.

And that's the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Brianna Blake. Tell us what you think about the relationship between happiness and age. You can post comments on our website, voaspecialenglish.com, or on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I'm Barbara Klein.