Great Apes Suffer Mid-Life Crisis, Study Finds

Some of us know all about having a midlife crisis. Now a new report says chimpanzees and orangutans have them, too.

Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England, who reported those findings, says maybe we inherit that midlife period of discontent through evolution. After all, apes don't have jobs, mortgages and marriages.

To do the study, researchers assessed the moods of more than 500 apes in zoos and other facilities around the world. The results showed that on average, the mood of the apes over their lifetimes descended to a low point around midlife before rising again.

That's comparable to the pattern seen in people. The work appears in Monday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.