Courtesy of Melissa Moore.

Serial murderer Keith Jesperson with his daughter, Melissa, and his newborn son. He was dubbed the "Happy Face Killer" amid a murder spree in the early to mid 1990s. Melissa Moore said she and her two siblings are healthy and happy today.

The young daughter that Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev left behind may face a future of stigma, secrecy and haunting questions about the father she may never stop loving, say both a forensic psychiatrist and the daughter of a serial murderer.

“She’s going to grow up and learn that the community thought of her father as a terrorist. Then she’s going to wonder: Do I have traits like my dad?” said Melissa Moore, whose father, Keith Jesperson, is convicted of killing eight women from 1990 to 1995. He’s serving life in prison. He was dubbed the “Happy Face Killer” because he sketched smiling heads on notes he wrote to authorities as they were hunting him.

“I had to go on that journey. I had to do a genealogical search of my family tree — where I found no other violence,” said Moore, now 33. “I had to learn that I don’t carry that. I had to see that I was separate from my dad."

Moore spent summers living with her father in Spokane, Wash., after her parents divorced when she was 10 -- during the period of time when he was committing his crimes. When Jesperson was caught, she was 15.

Moore said that how the bombing suspect's daughter may respond in future years will have a lot to do with "how her family treats it, that her self-worth has nothing to do with him, that his actions had nothing to do with her.” Moore said her own family reassured her of that and she received letters of support from her dad's sisters.

As last Monday's Boston Marathon bombings ultimately raged into a furious manhunt for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed during a police shootout Friday in Watertown, Mass., and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured and remains hospitalized, Moore said she “couldn’t help but watch it and compare it.”

Today, Moore is a married mother of two living in Dallas. And after 18 years of intense self-reflection, therapy and an autobiography, she's in a place of peace where her life is “normal — and normal is good.”

But Tamerlan Tsarnaev's daughter, who is only 3, may ultimately grapple with some of the same hard choices and hard truths, Moore says.

“The upside is I am now happy," Moore said. "But losing someone you love, there's always emptiness. I wish you could stop loving. I wish you could push a button: ‘I don’t have love for you anymore.’”

Parents of killers face the same struggle, she noted. First, they often look inward, blaming themselves and wondering if they failed their child in some way. "Then they ask: How do I stop loving my child?"

Moore said she knows her father's infamous legacy stretches beyond her.

“When my daughter first asked me when she was 6, ‘Mommy, where is your daddy?’ I realized that this doesn’t end with me. It continues on (within a family). It made me angry,” Moore said. “There are wounds you can never heal sometimes.”

She last communicated with her incarcerated father when she was 17 — by letter — telling him she was forced to switch schools because other students' parents didn’t want their kids interacting with Moore, and informing him "I don't like my name anymore. I'm so ashamed.” (She ultimately changed her last name when she was married.)

In fact, many children of high-profile killers are moved by parents to new towns and new schools and urged to keep the crimes confidential to stave off any stigma and teasing, said Dr. Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist in Chicago who has studied more than 130 serial killers — including how those crimes and their notoriety impacted the murderers’ families.

Courtesy of Melissa Moore

Melissa Moore today.

“What their parents usually do is change their name and try to get as far away as they can from the impact of the crime,” said Morrison, who authored a book on the topic. She also has possession of the brain of serial killer John Wayne Gacy for forensic study.

“If (Tsarnaev's daughter) maintains that name going into school, there definitely is going to be that reaction: 'Oh, are you related to him?' The teachers, the parents of her friends are not going to forget this,” Morrison said. “As she grows into being a pre-teen and a teen, she’s going to search for her father on the Internet. She will never be able to escape.”

Since Tsarnaev’s daughter is so young, she may not remember her father as she grows up, unlike Moore, but Morrison says she’ll likely still feel the emotional ripples.

"She won't retain the intellectual details until she learns about them later but the emotional details and experience will definitely have an impact on her now and in the future," said Morrison. The girl already is absorbing "what she feels other people around her are feeling: sadness, anger, confusion. We know even babies pick up on that."

Morrison has met Moore and knows that her emotional recovery came with “a tremendous amount of work.” All too often, the children of infamous killers fall victim to substance abuse issues or become involved in abusive relationships, Morrison said, in part because of their silent burden.

“What happens is: if you have to carry around a secret like this and your name is changed and you know what you’re parents did, that eats at you,” Morrison said. “You’ve got to have some sort of guilt: ‘Oh my gosh, could I possibly do something like this? Look at all the people who suffered and it was my parent who did this.’"

Added Moore: “I’ve spoken to several family members that have similar stories — a father or brother that was a serial killer. What struck me was how similar the process is for all of us. There is always residue. Pain is pain." 

Related stories:

Federal officials ask to interview wife of slain bomb suspect

'Rapid strides': Limb advances offer hope for Boston amputees

Mark Lennihan / AP

Harry Patel, an employee of Blondie's Deli and Grocery, talks on the phone while waiting for customers in New York on Monday. A new anti-smoking proposal would make New York the first city in the nation to keep tobacco products out of sight in retail stores. Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the goal is to reduce the youth smoking rate.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg raised eyebrows Monday, proposing a new law – the first of its kind in the nation – that would require cigarettes and other tobacco products be hidden from view of shoppers.

“We know that out of sight doesn’t always mean out of mind,” Bloomberg said during a news conference at Queens Hospital Center. “But in many cases it can and we think this measure will help reduce impulse purchases and if it does, it will literally save lives.”

Experts say there is evidence that the mere sight of a pack of cigarettes really can make smokers want to buy them.

“Nicotine is the most addictive drug there is and cigarettes are both biologically and psychologically addictive,” says Dr. Gail Saltz, a NYC psychiatrist, author and regular TODAY contributor. “Seeing cigarettes is a trigger. ‘There it is.’ It very well may make you want it more.”

Numerous studies back this up. A 2008 study published in the journal Addiction surveyed nearly 3,000 adults (including smokers, ex-smokers and those currently trying to quit) and found more than 25 percent of smokers bought cigarettes after seeing a cash register display -- even though they weren’t shopping for smokes. And one in five smokers trying to quit said they avoided the stores where they usually bought cigarettes because they knew if they went in, they’d buy them.

The allure is so strong even 31 percent of smokers readily admitted that removing cigarettes from store displays would make it much easier to quit.

“Point of purchase cigarette displays act as cues to smoke, even among those not explicitly intending to buy cigarettes and those trying to avoid smoking,” wrote psychologist and lead author Melanie Wakefield, director of the Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer in Victoria, Australia. “Effective POP marketing restrictions should encompass cigarette displays.”

Other studies have shown store cigarette promotions are strongly correlated with rates of youths taking up smoking as well as increased tobacco sales in the stores. A 2009 study in the journal Tobacco Control found that one of five shoppers who bought smokes at retail outlets with cigarettes on display at the check-out counter made an impulse buy.

“Visual triggers are a huge part of addiction,” says Joe Guppy, Seattle psychotherapist and addiction specialist. “That’s why when people are in recovery, they try to avoid visual triggers. I once had a client mention a magazine ad he saw once when he was trying to quit smoking. It showed a man taking that first drag off a cigarette, looking right into the camera. It probably took thousands of shots to capture that exact moment. But when it hit his brain, it made him go, ‘Oh, I want that so bad.’”

Adds Danny McGoldrick, vice president of research for Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, “Impulse buying can occur when you’re exposed to a number of different product displays but particularly if you have nicotine addiction.”

Guppy hails Bloomberg’s proposal, adding that “out of sight, out of mind” can be helpful with all kinds of addictions – from internet porn to sweets.

“I have a thing with chocolate,” he says. “If I want to moderate my intake of brownies, I’ll put them on top of the refrigerator instead of on the counter. That way, I’m not constantly triggered.”

Saltz warns that when it comes to something as addictive as nicotine, though, out of sight, out of mind may not always work.

“It’s not that simple because nicotine is addictive you’re going to seek it anyway if you’re already addicted,” she says. “But for people who may be trying to stay away and may not particularly be shopping for them, it would be better if it’s not in their face.”

Related:

• After big soda ban, NYC's Mayor Bloomberg wants to hide cigarettes
• Smoking costs you a decade of life
• A staggering teen smoking epidemic

A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, former Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo thinks of himself as a killer — and he carries the guilt every day.

"I can't forgive myself," he says. "And the people who can forgive me are dead."

With American troops at war for more than a decade, there's been an unprecedented number of studies into war zone psychology and an evolving understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. Clinicians suspect some troops are suffering from what they call "moral injuries" — wounds from having done something, or failed to stop something, that violates their moral code.

Though there may be some overlap in symptoms, moral injuries aren't what most people think of as PTSD, the nightmares and flashbacks of terrifying, life-threatening combat events. A moral injury tortures the conscience; symptoms include deep shame, guilt and rage. It's not a medical problem, and it's unclear how to treat it, says retired Col. Elspeth Ritchie, former psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general.

"The concept ... is more an existentialist one," she says.

The Marines, who prefer to call moral injuries "inner conflict," started a few years ago teaching unit leaders to identify the problem. And the Defense Department has approved funding for a study among Marines at California's Camp Pendleton to test a therapy that doctors hope will ease guilt.

But a solution could be a long time off.

"PTSD is a complex issue," says Navy Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Killing in war is the issue for some troops who believe they have a moral injury, but Ritchie says it also can come from a range of experiences, such as guarding prisoners or watching Iraqis kill Iraqis as they did during the sectarian violence in 2006-07.

"You may not have actually done something wrong by the law of war, but by your own humanity you feel that it's wrong," says Ritchie, now chief clinical officer at the District of Columbia's Department of Mental Health.

Kudo's remorse stems in part from the 2010 accidental killing of two Afghan teenagers on a motorcycle. His unit was fighting insurgents when the pair approached from a distance and appeared to be shooting as well.

Kudo says what Marines mistook for guns were actually "sticks and bundles, like you'd seen in old cartoons with hobos." What Marines thought were muzzle flashes were likely glints of light bouncing off the motorcycle's chrome.

"There's no day — whether it's in the shower or whether it's walking down the street ... that I don't think about things that happened over there," says Kudo, now a graduate student at New York University.

"Human beings aren't just turn-on, turn-off switches," Veterans of Foreign Wars spokesman Joe Davis says, noting that moral injury is just a different name for a familiar military problem. "You're raised 'Thou shalt not kill,' but you do it for self-preservation or for your buddies."

Kudo never personally shot anyone. But he feels responsible for the deaths of the teens on the motorcycle. Like other officers who've spoken about moral injuries, he also feels responsible for deaths that resulted from orders he gave in other missions.

The hardest part, Kudo says, is that "nobody talks about it."

As executive officer of a Marine company, Kudo also felt inadequate when he had to comfort a subordinate grieving over the death of another Marine.

Dr. Brett Litz, a clinical psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Boston, sees moral injury, the loss of comrades and the terror associated with PTSD as a "three-legged stool" of troop suffering. Though there's little data on moral injury, he says a study asked soldiers seeking counseling for PTSD in Texas what their main problem was; it broke down to "roughly a third, a third and a third" among those with fear, those with loss issues and those with moral injury.

The raw number of people who have moral injuries also isn't known. It's not an official diagnosis for purposes of getting veteran benefits, though it's believed by some doctors that many vets with moral injuries are getting care on a diagnosis of PTSD — care that wouldn't specifically fit their problem.

Like PTSD, which could affect an estimated 20 percent of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, moral injury is not experienced by all troops.

"It's in the eye of the beholder," says retired Navy Capt. William Nash, a psychiatrist who headed Marine Corps combat stress programs and has partnered with Litz on research. The vast majority of ground combat fighters may be able to pull the trigger without feeling they did something wrong, he says.

As the military has focused on fear-based PTSD, it hasn't paid enough attention to loss and moral injury, Litz and others believe. And that has hampered the development of strategies to help troops with those other problems and train them to avoid the problems in the first place, he says.

Lumping people into the PTSD category "renders soldiers automatically into mental patients instead of wounded souls," writes Iraq vet Tyler Boudreau, a former Marine captain and assistant operations officer to an infantry battalion.

Boudreau resigned his commission after having questions of conscience. He wrote in the Massachusetts Review, a literary magazine, that being diagnosed with PTSD doesn't account for nontraumatic events that are morally troubling: "It's far too easy for people at home, particularly those not directly affected by war ... to shed a disingenuous tear for the veterans, donate a few bucks and whisk them off to the closest shrink ... out of sight and out of mind" and leaving "no incentive in the community or in the household to engage them."

So what should be done?

"I don't think we know," Ritchie says.

Troops who express ethical or spiritual problems have long been told to see the chaplain. Chaplains see troops struggling with moral injury "at the micro level, down in the trenches," says Lt. Col. Jeffrey L. Voyles, licensed counselor and supervisor at the Army chaplain training program in Fort Benning, Ga. A soldier wrestling with the right or wrong of a particular war zone event might ask: "Do I need to confess this?" Or, Voyles says, a soldier will say he's "gone past the point of being redeemed, (the point where) God could forgive him" — and he uses language like this:

"I'm a monster."

"I let somebody down."

"I didn't do as much as I could do."

Some chaplains and civilian church organizations have been organizing community events where troops tell their stories, hoping that will help them re-integrate into society.

Some soldiers report being helped by Army programs like yoga or art therapy. The Army also has a program to promote resilience and another called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness to promote mental as well as physical wellness; some clinicians say the latter program may help reduce risk of moral injury but doesn't help troops recognize when they or a buddy have the problem.

Nash says the Marines are using "psychological first aid techniques" to help service members deal with moral injury, loss and other traumatic events. But it's a young program, not uniformly implemented and just now undergoing outside evaluation for its effectiveness, he says.

At Camp Pendleton, the therapy trial will be tailored to each Marine's war experiences; troops with fear-based problems might use a standard PTSD approach; those with moral injury may have an imaginary conversation with the lost person.

Forgiveness, more than anything, is key to helping troops who feel they have transgressed, Nash says.

But the issue is so much more complicated that wholesale solutions across the military, if there are any, will likely be some time coming.

Many in the armed forces view PTSD as weakness. Similarly, they feel the term "moral injury" is insulting, implying an ethical failing in a force whose motto stresses honor, duty and country.

At the same time, lawyers don't like the idea of someone asking troops to incriminate themselves in war crimes — real or imagined.

That leaves a question for troops, doctors, chaplains, lawyers and the military brass: How do you help someone if they don't feel they can say what's bothering them?

Related stories:

• Freshly home, troops face tough few months
• Hip-hop lyrics reveal veterans' sharp edges
• Wearing black on "alive day"

I’m stressed, you’re stressed, your partner is stressed, even our pets are stressed. But according a new survey from the American Psychological Association, the most stressed generation of adults in the nation is also the youngest.

So-called “Millennials,” defined here as American adults ages 18 to 34, reported higher stress levels than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and more Millennials said that their stress level had increased in the last year. And 52 percent of this age group even said stress had kept them up at night.

These new figures are from the APA’s annual report, Stress in America, which surveyed 2,020 American adults in a questionnaire conducted online by Harris Interactive in August 2012. The APA has commissioned the survey every year since 2007.

Generation Xers’ stress level was tied with Millennials, both reporting an average level of 5.4 on a 10-point scale, but slightly fewer Gen Xers, those aged 34 to 47, said their stress increased in the past year or was causing them to lose sleep.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what young people might be stressing over: For one, the U.S. unemployment rate continues to creep higher, last week edging up to 7.9 percent. Some recent figures from the non-partisan group Generation Opportunity suggest the unemployment rate is even higher among 18- to 29-year-olds, at 11.5 percent, and only half of this age group believe they’ll be getting Social Security.

“Most of these young people have come out of college or graduate school with horrendous student debt into a job market where there are not very many jobs,” Katherine Nordal , executive director for professional practice of the APA, told “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.” “This has put their life plans probably on hiatus; they may be postponing marriage, postponing having a family.”

The APA survey found that 76 percent of Millennials surveyed by the APA say that work is a somewhat or significant stressor, compared to 65 percent of Gen Xers and 62 percent of Boomers. That’s a number that has been ticking upwards -- in the APA’s 2009 survey, for example, less than half of Millennials reported work as a somewhat or significant stressor.

And, as it turns out, young adults are not great at handling all this self-reported stress they’re under: Forty-four percent of both Millenials and Gen Xers say they’d experienced irritability or anger due to stress, compared to 36 percent of Boomers and 15 percent of what the APA deemed “Matures,” or Americans older than 67.

“Stress is a huge factor when we look at medical problems such as obesity, hypertension, diabetes, cardiac disease,” says NBC’s chief medical editor, Dr. Nancy Snyderman. That’s more bad news for younger Americans, who say they more likely than older generations to try to manage their stress by eating junk, drinking alcohol and smoking.

It's tempting to raise an eyebrow at the findings because the stress is self-reported: How are we sure that young people are really under as much stress as they say? To a certain extent, that doesn't really matter. If you perceive yourself to be under an incredible amount of stress, then that stress is real to you, says Gail Saltz, an New York City psychiatrist and frequent TODAY contributor. 

"I think that does have something to do about the acquisition of coping skills," Saltz says. "As you manage to get past things, your ability to look back as something else comes along and say, 'Well, I got through that' -- that goes a long way." 

We do seem to get better at managing stress as we age, according to the APA’s self-reported figures. While 29 percent of Millennials, 35 percent of Gen Xers and 38 percent of Boomers (adults aged 48 to 66) said they are doing an excellent or very good job at managing stress, half of those older than 67 thought they were doing a bang-up job of keeping their stress manageable. 

"There really is something to 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger,'" Saltz says. 

Each morning, 48-year-old Troy Prater starts his day by getting breakfast for his teenage triplets. On weekdays he checks homework and then hurries them off to school. Then it’s back home to take care of his mom, Ella, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Life, Prater says, “is organized chaos.” 

Prater is among the millions of Americans who have stepped up to do the right thing and take care of family members who can’t take care of themselves. Unfortunately, most caregivers are spread so thin that they don’t have time to take care of their own needs, NBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman reports.

“Caregivers don’t go to the dentist; they don’t get mammograms or annual checkups,” says Melissa Gartenberg Livney, a clinical
psychologist with the PENN Memory Center at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “So they get sick.”

Even worse, Livney says, “there’s some evidence that this kind of stress can contribute to the onset of dementia" which is why she and others are trying to encourage caregivers to get help, to find ways to take breaks, and to make and keep their own doctors’ appointments.

How many people have stepped up to take care of a family member?  

One survey found that nearly one third of American households had someone serving as an unpaid family caregiver. That adds up to almost 40 million households with a caregiver present, according to the 2009 survey conducted by the National Alliance for Caregiving in conjunction with the AARP.

Many of those caregivers are dealing with Alzheimer’s, which Livney says can be incredibly stressful.

"Alzheimer's disease is 10 or 15 years of slow and steady loss of the person you once knew," she says. "Caregivers often suffer in silence and feel guilty when they don't feel up to the work."

Currently, there are 5 million Americans who have been diagnosed with the disease, says Beth Kallmyer, vice president of constituent services at the Alzheimer’s Association. “And we estimate that there are 15 million people caring for them.”

Unfortunately, the number of Alzheimer's patients is growing. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that there will be 16 million Americans with the disease by mid-century if nothing changes. And that means there will be even more of us taking care of spouses and parents suffering from dementia.

Prater, who juggles caregiving along with his normal responsibilities as a dad, acknowledges the dual roles can be very taxing.

“I’m running on adrenaline,” he says. “I’ve lost quite a few pounds.”

What's the answer to getting caregivers to care for themselves?

People like Prater need to ask for help, Kallmyer says. But most seem to feel that caregiving is something they need to do on their own. And that's a setup for disaster, she says.

“When you’re taking care of someone over a period of time, you can’t just soldier on,” Kallmyer says. “At some point your health will be impacted and that will keep you from being the best caregiver you can be. We often ask people, ‘If you get sick and land in the hospital then what is going to happen?’”

Kallmyer suspects that the urge to go it alone is part of the American character. She’d like to see that change.

So would Livney.

"[Caregivers] need to allow themselves to not be perfect," she says.  

They also need to learn to look after their own needs.

“People need to give themselves permission to take care of themselves,” says Livney. “That’s what we focus on. We don’t spend much time talking about the disease and functional aspects of caring for someone with dementia. We try to help people understand how to take care of themselves."

Shelley Taylor’s father was in his mid-70s when two homeless men duped him out of $17,000.

The first one, a man Taylor’s father described as “nice,” walked him to the bank where he withdrew $6,000. "Anybody looking at him should have picked up on the cues that said 'Do not give this man $6,000’,” Taylor says. “I still don't know how my father could not pick up that this was not a nice young man."

Such stories are everywhere – the couple who gave all their savings to a Canadian scammer, retirees who lost their life savings to fraudulent investment schemes, homeowners who ponied up thousands up front for roof repairs they didn’t need – and never got.

Pictorial Parade / Getty Images file

A police mug shot of Italian-born American swindler Charles Ponzi (1882 - 1949) after his arrest for forgery under the name of Charles Bianchi, Montreal, Canada, 1909. Ponzi's name now lives on in the particular fraud known as a ponzi scheme.

But Taylor, a professor of psychology at the University of California Los Angeles, is beginning to understand why. And it’s not exactly what everyone has assumed. It all has to do with the fear centers in the brain.

Gerontologists and crime experts agree the elderly are more vulnerable to fraud and many have assumed it’s because of diminished brain capacity, as well as because retired people often have more assets and more time on their hands. But new research suggests that older people's vulnerability might have more to do with the way older brains process visual cues.

According to insurer MetLife’s Mature Market Institute, American seniors lose $2.9 billion a year to fraud. Most victims are between 80 and 89, the Insutute found in a study conducted with the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse and the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech.

“So many people say the postwar generation is a very trusting generation. The implication is that this is a problem that will go away,” Taylor said in a telephone interview.

Her research, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests something else might be at work — a change in the way people process fear and suspicion.

“You know the ‘uh oh’ sense you get sometimes, the little sense that something is not quite right?” Taylor asks. “It’s not something you can necessarily verbalize. That's what the older adults aren’t getting.”

Taylor’s team did two studies. In one, they asked 119 people aged 55 to 84 to look at photographs of people’s faces and rate them for trustworthiness, using standard cues that have been well-studied. They asked 24 young adults in their 20s to do the same.

“(Cues) that reliably occur when people are being deceitful are a backward lean, a false smile – so that is a smile that you see in the mouth but it doesn’t extend up to the eyes,” Taylor says. “Gaze aversion. In our stimuli, people also see males as less trustworthy than females. And for some reason facial hair is a cue to untrustworthiness — people perceive it that way, even though men with facial hair aren’t any less trustworthy.”

The two age groups tended to react the same to the “trustworthy” and neutral faces. But those in the older group were far less likely to agree with the young people on who looked “untrustworthy.”

"They missed facial cues that are pretty easily distinguished,” Taylor said. “Is something going on the brain that would explain this pattern?”

To see, Taylor’s team set up a second study using functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI – a way to look at brain activity in real time. They studied 23 older adults aged 55 to 80 and 21 younger adults, with an average age of 33.

"We wanted to find out whether there are differences in how the brain reacts to these faces, and the answer is yes, there are," Taylor said.

In the younger adults, an area of the brain called the anterior insula was active when they were examining all the faces, but especially when looking at those with expressions or characteristics that people associate with being untrustworthy. This brain region did not activate nearly so much in the older people.

“Their brains are not saying 'be wary,' as the brains of the younger adults are,” Taylor said.

“Thus, a diminished ‘gut’ response to cues of untrustworthiness may partially underlie older adults’ vulnerability to fraud,” the team concluded in the report.

Taylor said it’s not clear whether this is caused by reduced brain function, or perhaps it’s a natural consequence of getting older.

“We know that older adults are good emotion regulators. They make their lives emotionally more positive,” she said.

“They don’t stress out over small things. They turn away from negative scenes. They are less likely to go to scary negative movies. They kind of keep their emotional life in balance.”

This sounds familiar to Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who specializes in how older people respond to the world. “Older people tend to prefer good over bad,” she agreed.

The differences might not necessarily mean dysfunction, says Carstensen, who was not involved in Taylor’s research. “It’s not about chronological age so much as closeness to death,” she said. All people tend to monitor how much time they have left on this planet, consciously or unconsciously. Younger people with terminal illness often respond the same way older people do, by looking at the bright side of things.

“When they do that, it tends to be good for mental health,” Carstensen said.

Taylor sees it, too. “Sometimes you have an experience and you think, ‘wow that really would have bothered me 10 years ago’,” she said. “It’s probably because the amygdala or the insula or both are not firing. They not giving that same feedback of alarm that you might have epxerienced when you were younger.”

This difference may be important in efforts to help protect older people from fraud. Carstensen worries about policies that might restrict older people from making financial decisions. A better route might be to help people deflect the huge number of temptations that come their way through the mail, on the phone, or when the scam artists knock on the front door.

For her next study, Taylor’s team will study the brain responses of people during a real, in-person financial scam.

In the meantime, she has some advice.

“The answer is to hang up,” Taylor advises. “Throw it away. Don’t open it. Don’t go to the free lunch seminar. Stop it at the source."

Related stories:

Anatomy of a fraud

Retirement scams target the elderly

Elder scams often all in the family

You surely know by now that the Powerball jackpot is set to hit at least $550 million tonight. You should also know that your odds of winning the grand prize are somewhere around 1 in 176 million (at least, we really hope you know that). So here's a bit of comfort for you tonight as you stare dejectedly at your losing ticket: Most lottery winners don't end up any happier than the rest of us. 

Yeah, yeah, you can probably name 550 million reasons why winning the jackpot tonight will make you happy. But here's the truth: A handful of psychology studies over the years have evaluated the happiness of lottery winners over time, and found that after the initial glee of getting one of those big giant checks has faded away, most winners actually end up no happier than they were before hitting the jackpot.

Arguably the most famous paper on this subject was published the late 1970s, and it's a doozy: Psychologists interviewed winners of the Illinois State Lottery and compared them with non-winners -- and, just for good measure, people who had suffered some terrible accident that left them paraplegic or quadriplegic. (You can find the abstract here, but you'll have to pay to read the full report.) Each group answered a series of questions designed to measure their level of happiness.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Stefanie Graef holds what she hopes is the winning Powerball ticket she just bought at Circle News Stand on Tuesday in Hollywood, Fla. If she's lucky, she won't win.

What they found was counterintuitive, to say the least: In terms of overall happiness, the lottery winners were not significantly happier than the non-lottery winners. (The accident victims were less happy, but not by much.) But when it came to rating everyday happiness, the lottery winners took "significantly less pleasure" in the simple things like chatting with a friend, reading a magazine or receiving a compliment. 

"Humans tend to have a relatively set point of mood," explains Gail Saltz, a New York City psychiatrist and frequent TODAY contributor. Most people tend to bounce back to that set point after a major life event, whether it's something negative or positive. But for some lottery winners, psychologists believe hitting an especially huge jackpot may alter that happiness baseline, making it harder to see the joy in everyday things. 

More recently than the '70s research, a 2008 University of California, Santa Barbara, paper measured people's happiness six months after winning a relatively modest lottery prize -- a lump sum equivalent to about eight months' worth of income. "We found that this had zero detectable effect on happiness at that time," says Peter Kuhn, one of the study authors and a professor of economics at the university. 

Andrew Jackson "Jack'' Whittaker Jr., his wife Jewell, right, and their granddaughter Brandi Bragg, left, pose for a photograph after being interviewed by TODAY in this December 2002. In his darkest moments, Whittaker has said he sometimes wondered if winning the nearly $315 million Powerball game was really worth it.

You've heard the stories of lottery winners whose post-jackpot lives turned sour. There's Jack Whittaker, the West Virginia man who in 2002 won the nearly $315 million Powerball jackpot. Initially, he generously gave millions to charities, including $14 million to start his own Jack Whittaker Foundation. But later, the dream turned to nightmare: A briefcase with $545,000 in cash and cashier's checks was stolen from his car while it was parked outside of a Cross Lanes, W. Va., strip club. His office and home were broken into, he was arrested twice for drunken-driving -- and the list goes on. 

Or there's Alex Toth, a Florida man who in 1990 won $13 million to be doled out in 20-year-payments of $666,666. (Seriously.) At his death in 2008, the Tampa Bay Times reported on the sad direction his life had taken: Years of living it up led to a split from his wife and charges of fradulent tax returns, among other serious woes.

What gives? Behavior experts have a couple theories. One is simply that we humans just tend to get used to stuff -- the good and the bad. The psychological concept is called "happiness adaptation," and Michael Norton, associate professor at Harvard Business School, co-authored a 2007 paper that sought to uncover why hitting major life goals -- including the dreamlike goal of winning the lottery and the more down-to-earth goal of getting married -- don't end up making us as happy as we expect them to. 

"The idea of adaptation seems like a negative thing --  it's a shame that we have to get used to the good things in our life, from lottery winnings to ice cream. But adaptation also helps us when bad things happen to us, making the impact of losing our job or getting divorced less painful over time," explains Norton, who is also the coauthor of the forthcoming book, "Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending." 

He continues, "Big positive and negative events can have a lasting impact on our happiness, but this impact tends to decrease over time. In some sense, because people have so many facets of their life - from their job to their friends to their family to their hobbies - the impact of a change in any one of those facets is less extreme than we think, because many of the other things in our lives stay the same. (We win the lottery but we are still stuck with our same siblings, for example.) As a result of this, people tend to adapt to life events and end up closer to where they were than they think they'd be."

This is partially because we are terrible at predicting how happy more money is going to make us. The truth is, money can make you happy -- but only up to a point. "Research shows that the impact of additional income on happiness begins to level off around $75,000 of income - but people keep trying to make more and more money in the mistaken belief that their happiness will continue to increase," Norton says. "As a result of this mistaken belief, people think that big windfalls will change their happiness dramatically - and may end up with less happiness than they expected."

On the other end of the spectrum, landing a windfall that lifts you out of a financial pit really can provide significant, lasting happiness. In 2006, Sandra Hayes, then a 46-year-old social worker making $25,000 a year, and 12 of her coworkers won the $224 million Powerball jackpot. After taxes and splitting the money with her coworkers, Hayes had won $10 million. She bought her dream car (a brand-new Lexus) and her dream home (a half-million dollar house in St. Louis). But first, she paid off her current home and then gave that house to her daughter and grandchildren, who'd been living in a rough neighborhood. She quit her job and now spends her days writing -- she's already published one book and is working on a second one. 

"Yes, my life is different, and it feels good," says Hayes. "This summer I had a $900 water bill. Six years ago, well, if I had a substantially huge bill, I would’ve had to make payment arrangements. That’s one of the things I like, that I’m able to pay my bills in full and not scuffle."

The first secret, as Hayes tells it, to winning the lottery without losing your mind is to immediately meet with a financial planner you trust and make a plan that works for you. The second is a little simpler. She says, "Just because you win the lottery, it does not change you as a person."

Related: 

Hey, Powerball winner: Here's your holiday shopping list

Advice for the Powerball winner: Pay taxes

11 crazy things more likely to happen than winning the Powerball jackpot

Follow NBCNews.com health writer Melissa Dahl on Twitter: @melissadahl. 

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Chris Graythen / Getty Images

LAPLACE, LA - AUGUST 29: Rescue workers transport residents trapped by rising water from Hurricane Isaac in the River Forest subdivision on August 29, 2012 in LaPlace, Louisiana. The large Level 1 hurricane slowly moved across southeast Louisiana, dumping huge amounts of rain and knocking out power to Louisianans in scattered parts of the state. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

It’s the question so many of us have while watching news coverage of a hurricane or tropical storm like Isaac: Who are these people who don’t leave home even as an angry storm is advancing – and what are they thinking?!

The short answer: For some, the up-and-leaving idea isn’t as easy as it sounds to those of us watching from a safe and dry distance. Actually, a 2009 article published in the journal Psychological Science sought to examine the reasons some people won’t evacuate, despite the urging or even mandates of city and state officials, by asking a group who would know: Hurricane Katrina survivors who weathered the storm at home.

“It seems like asking ‘Why didn't people leave?’ presumes that that's the best option for everyone to make,” says Hilary Bergsieker, who worked with Nicole Stephens, now of Northwestern University, on the study. The fact is, many people lack the resources to escape. Having no money, no mode of transportation and no friends or family in safe places means no choice but to weather the storm. 

In the case of Katrina, those who evacuated before the storm hit were mostly white, mostly middle class; on the other hand, those who stayed were mostly black, mostly working class. The “leavers,” as the Psychological Science paper terms those who fled before the storm, had privileges that they probably took for granted: more education, more money, reliable access to transportation, social networks that extended farther away from the hurricane-hit area, and more access to news reports to warn them of the storm’s severity.

"Middle- and upper-class Americans are more geographically mobile and have more experience traveling nationally and internationally. I think that the familiarity with moving or traveling would contribute to the ability to make a plan for how to evacuate,” says Stephens, who is an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. "On the other hand, if you have spent most of your life in the same community, then you would likely feel more attachment to your home and feel less comfortable as well as less equipped to quickly uproot yourself in response to evacuation orders." 

Even if a person does have the resources at hand to make an escape, it might be unthinkable to leave behind a tightknit community like those you’d find in many parts of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi.

Slideshow: Isaac moves inland

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A downgraded Isaac floods coastal communities and forces new evacuations, but levees still hold.

Launch slideshow

“There's sort of the physical resources factor, but there's also the psychological factors. That's your world; that's all you know,” says Bergsieker, who is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. And, as the thinking goes, if your neighbor tells you he’s staying, then you might stay, too – after all, if something happened to him, who would be there to take care of him if you leave? Some of the 79 Katrina survivors interviewed in the 2009 study did have the resources to go, but they didn’t have the heart to leave.

Ariella Cohen moved to New Orleans in 2007, so she wasn’t there when Katrina hit. But in 2008, when Hurricane Gustav started moving toward her city, she decided to stick it out, despite the city's mandatory evacuation order.

“I had friends who had stayed through Katrina, and I had heard all their stories about it, and so I think I also inherited all their jadedness, too,” says Cohen, who wrote about her Gustav close encounter for the website Next American City. “You know, just kind of that New Orleanian attitude of, ‘Whatever! We’re going to stay here. Do you want another beer?’” On a more serious note, her rationale for staying was: 'I’m young, I’m able-bodied and relatively fit. What if someone older and weaker needs me?' “I was, like, 27 at the time, so I was young and strong, and I would be able to help people if the time came,” says Choen, now 31, who lives in Philadelphia, where she works as an editor for the same site that published her 2008 essay.

Mistrust of outsiders – as in, people who aren’t from your community who are claiming to know more than you do about your own home by telling you to leave it – can play a part, too. “This is where you've always been your whole life, and suddenly people on the radio are telling you you have to leave? That may seem like a much more dangerous choice than to stay with people from your church, or people from your block,” Bergsieker says.

Besides, those who live in a hurricane-prone area hear these warnings all the time. It can be easy to stay in denial about an impending storm’s ferocity when the local news station has cried “hurricane” so many times before. (Sometimes that tack pans out: In Cohen’s lucky case, Gustav bypassed New Orleans.)

Read this far and still think anyone who’d ignore a hurricane evacuation mandate must be just plain crazy? That sounds about right. A second piece of the study asked both Katrina relief workers and regular folks to describe the “leavers” and the “stayers” in three words. The leavers were called independent, self-reliant, responsible, hard-working, conscientious. The stayers, on the other hand, were described mostly in negative terms: Passive. Crazy. Lazy. Irresponsible. Careless. Hopeless. 

Take a dive into the comments section on this NBCNews.com story on Isaac, and the sentiment sounds about the same. Like this one: "What part of MANDATORY EVACUATION do these people NOT UNDERSTAND!" (Bold text and gratuitous use of the caps-lock key are the commenter's own.) Or this: "You were told to evacuate! Now you should be on your own and not expect others to put themselves in harms way!"

In the study, relief workers and others alike acknowledged that many of the stayers might have lacked the financial resources to leave, and yet they still used mostly negative terms to describe them. That disconnect is what Stephens was interested in exploring in the 2009 article, which argues that maybe people who “choose” to dig in their heels and remain in their communities, even when a storm’s a-comin’, actually don’t feel like they ever had a choice. Whether for financial or psychological motives, they're staying. 

 “In retrospect, definitely I was a bit naïve. Natural disasters don’t go by the logic of human psychology,” Cohen acknowledges. “I think that there’s a lot of it that’s hard to conceive – like, it’s hard to conceive of your own death, it’s difficult to conceive of natural disaster. It just seemed unbelievable that another storm could hit the city hard. And so I stayed.”

Keep up with NBCNews.com health editor Melissa Dahl on Twitter.

Related stories:

• More evacuations as Isaac dumps rain on Gulf
• The long road back from Katrina
• Horrible memories for New Orleanians