Facial age cues and emotional expression interact asymmetrically: Age cues moderate emotion categorization (original) (raw)
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Be Happy Not Sad for Your Youth: The Effect of Emotional Expression on Age Perception
Perceived age is a psychosocial factor that can influence both with whom and how we choose to interact socially. Though intuition tells us that a smile makes us look younger, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists to explain how age-irrelevant emotional expressions bias the subjective decision threshold for age. We examined the role that emotional expression plays in the process of judging one's age from a face. College-aged participants were asked to sort the emotional and neutral expressions of male facial stimuli that had been morphed across eight age levels into categories of either " young " or " old. " Our results indicated that faces at the lower age levels were more likely to be categorized as old when they showed a sad facial expression compared to neutral expressions. Mirroring that, happy faces were more often judged as young at higher age levels than neutral faces. Our findings suggest that emotion interacts with age perception such that happy expression increases the threshold for an old decision, while sad expression decreases the threshold for an old decision in a young adult sample.
Interpreting the emotions of others through their facial expressions can provide important social information, yet the way in which we judge an emotion is subject to psychosocial factors. We hypothesized that the age of a face would bias how the emotional expressions are judged, with older faces generally more likely to be viewed as having more positive and less negative expressions than younger faces. Using two-alternative forced-choice perceptual decision tasks, participants sorted young and old faces of which emotional expressions were gradually morphed into one of two categories— " neutral vs. happy " and " neutral vs. angry. " The results indicated that old faces were more frequently perceived as having a happy expression at the lower emotional intensity levels, and less frequently perceived as having an angry expression at the higher emotional intensity levels than younger faces in young adults. Critically, the perceptual decision threshold at which old faces were judged as happy was lower than for young faces, and higher for angry old faces compared to young faces. These findings suggest that the age of the face influences how its emotional expression is interpreted in social interactions.
Face processing is a crucial element of human social interaction. Social category information on faces, including race, sex and age cues, can influence the perception of emotional expressions. Little is known about the effects of age cues on emotion processing, nor the potential mechanisms underlying this influence. Works which address this interaction, proposed mechanisms and associated theoretical models will be included in this literature review. The evidence examined suggests that the most compelling explanation for this interaction is congruence between the emotional valence of specific social categories and the displayed emotional expression. However, existing research has used only young vs older adult face stimuli or targeted manipulations of young adult faces. The proposed study aims to extend the small body of existing age research by comparing responses to child vs young adult face stimuli, using experimental design to competitively test three major proposed underlying mechanisms. The results of this research may contribute to a greater understanding of how humans process social category cues and emotional expressions
Cognition and Emotion, 2018
Recently, Cognition and Emotion published an article demonstrating that age cues affect the speed and accuracy of emotion recognition. The authors claimed that the observed effect of target age on emotion recognition is better explained by evaluative than stereotype associations. Although we agree with their conclusion, we believe that with the research method the authors employed, it was impossible to detect a stereotype effect to begin with. In the current research, we successfully replicate previous findings (Study 1). Furthermore, by changing the comparative context, Study 2 provides a first test of age-stereotypes affecting emotions recognition. We discuss recommendations for future studies in the domain of social categorisation and emotion recognition.
Tuning to the Positive: Age-Related Differences in Subjective Perception of Facial Emotion
PloS one, 2016
Facial expressions aid social transactions and serve as socialization tools, with smiles signaling approval and reward, and angry faces signaling disapproval and punishment. The present study examined whether the subjective experience of positive vs. negative facial expressions differs between children and adults. Specifically, we examined age-related differences in biases toward happy and angry facial expressions. Young children (5-7 years) and young adults (18-29 years) rated the intensity of happy and angry expressions as well as levels of experienced arousal. Results showed that young children-but not young adults-rated happy facial expressions as both more intense and arousing than angry faces. This finding, which we replicated in two independent samples, was not due to differences in the ability to identify facial expressions, and suggests that children are more tuned to information in positive expressions. Together these studies provide evidence that children see unambiguous ...
Emotional expressions reduce the own-age bias
Emotion, 2019
We are better at recognising faces of our own age group compared to faces of other age groups. It has been suggested that this own-age bias (OAB) might occur because of perceptual-expertise and/or social-cognitive mechanisms. While there is evidence to suggest effects of perceptual-expertise, little research has explored the role of social-cognitive factors. To do so, we looked at how the presence of an emotional expression on the face changes the magnitude of the OAB. Across three experiments young adult participants were presented with young and older adult faces to remember. Neutral faces were first presented alone (Experiment 1) to validate the proposed paradigm, and then presented along with angry (Experiment 2), and sad or happy faces (Experiment 3). The presence of an emotional expression improved the recognition of older adult faces, reducing the OAB which was evident for neutral faces. These results support the involvement of social-cognitive factors in the OAB, suggesting that a perceptual-expertise account cannot fully explain this face recognition bias.
Frontiers in psychology, 2017
Considerable research has shown effects of facial appearance on trait impressions and group stereotypes. We extended those findings in two studies that investigated the contribution of resemblance to emotion expressions and attractiveness to younger adults (YA) and older adults (OA) age and gender stereotypes on the dimensions of warmth and competence. Using connectionist modeling of facial metrics of 240 neutral younger and older faces, Study 1 found that, neutral expression older faces or female faces showed greater structural resemblance to happy expressions and less resemblance to angry expressions than did younger or male faces, respectively. In addition, neutral female faces showed greater resemblance to surprise expressions. In Study 2, YA and OA rated the faces of Study 1 for attractiveness and for 4 traits that we aggregated on the dimensions of competence (competent, healthy) and warmth (trustworthy, not shrewd). We found that YA, but not OA, age stereotypes replicated pre...
Facial age affects emotional expression decoding
Frontiers in Psychology, 2014
Facial expressions convey important information on emotional states of our interaction partners. However, in interactions between younger and older adults, there is evidence for a reduced ability to accurately decode emotional facial expressions. Previous studies have often followed up this phenomenon by examining the effect of the observers' age. However, decoding emotional faces is also likely to be influenced by stimulus features, and age-related changes in the face such as wrinkles and folds may render facial expressions of older adults harder to decode. In this paper, we review theoretical frameworks and empirical findings on age effects on decoding emotional expressions, with an emphasis on age-of-face effects. We conclude that the age of the face plays an important role for facial expression decoding. Lower expressivity, age-related changes in the face, less elaborated emotion schemas for older faces, negative attitudes toward older adults, and different visual scan patterns and neural processing of older than younger faces may lower decoding accuracy for older faces. Furthermore, age-related stereotypes and age-related changes in the face may bias the attribution of specific emotions such as sadness to older faces.
Let me guess how old you are: Effects of age, gender, and facial expression on perceptions of age
Psychology and Aging, 2012
Perceptions of age influence how we evaluate, approach, and interact with other people. Based on a paramorphic human judgment model, the present study investigates possible determinants of accuracy and bias in age estimation across the adult life span. For this purpose, 154 young, middle-aged, and older participants of both genders estimated the age of 171 faces of young, middle-aged, and older men and women, portrayed on a total of 2,052 photographs. Each face displayed either an angry, fearful, disgusted, happy, sad, or neutral expression (FACES database; Ebner, Riediger, & Lindenberger, 2010). We found that age estimation ability decreased with age. Older and young adults, however, were more accurate and less biased in estimating the age of members of their own as compared with those of the other age group. In contrast, no reliable own-gender advantage was observed. Generally, the age of older faces was more difficult to estimate than the age of younger faces. Furthermore, facial expressions had a substantial impact on accuracy and bias of age estimation. Relative to other facial expressions, the age of neutral faces was estimated most accurately, while the age of faces displaying happy expressions was most likely underestimated. Results are discussed in terms of methodological and practical implications for research on age estimation.