Caring more and knowing more reduces age-related differences in emotion perception

Age Differences in Emotion Recognition: The Task Matters

The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2010

Objectives. This study examined the impact of context information on emotion recognition from a lifespan developmental perspective. The main prediction was that age-related deficits in emotion recognition will only be evident in context-poor tasks. Methods. A sample of 48 younger (M age = 23 years) and 35 older women (M age = 70 years) watched 48 film clips, each depicting a female target who talked about an emotional biographical episode and expressed one of three target emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, or anger). Half of the films were presented without sound (context-poor condition) and the other half was presented with sound (context-rich condition). Results. Independent of the condition, younger women were better at recognizing sadness and anger than older women. However, the condition had an effect on age differences in happiness recognition: Age-related deficits were only evident in the context-poor condition. In addition, we found that logical reasoning predicted individual differences and age-related differences in sadness and anger recognition but not in happiness recognition. Discussion. The present findings suggest that age differences in emotion recognition are context and emotion specific. Together, the evidence speaks for substantial plasticity in emotion recognition (i.e., within-person variability) well into old age.

Aging and emotion recognition: Not just a losing matter

Psychology and Aging, 2012

Past studies on emotion recognition and aging have found evidence of age-related decline when emotion recognition was assessed by having participants detect single emotions depicted in static images of full or partial (e.g., eye region) faces. These tests afford good experimental control but do not capture the dynamic nature of real-world emotion recognition, which is often characterized by continuous emotional judgments and dynamic multi-modal stimuli. Research suggests that older adults often perform better under conditions that better mimic real-world social contexts. We assessed emotion recognition in young, middle-aged, and older adults using two traditional methods (single emotion judgments of static images of faces and eyes) and an additional method in which participants made continuous emotion judgments of dynamic, multi-modal stimuli (videotaped interactions between young, middle-aged, and older couples). Results revealed an age by test interaction. Largely consistent with prior research, we found some evidence that older adults performed worse than young adults when judging single emotions from images of faces (for sad and disgust faces only) and eyes (for older eyes only), with middle-aged adults falling in between. In contrast, older adults did better than young adults on the test involving continuous emotion judgments of dyadic interactions, with middle-aged adults falling in between. In tests in which target stimuli differed in age, emotion recognition was not facilitated by an age match between participant and target. These findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and methodological implications for the study of aging and emotional processing.

Aging Neuropsychology and Cognition, 2018

Multi-label tasks confound age differences in perceptual and cognitive processes. We examined age differences in emotion perception with a technique that did not require verbal labels. Participants matched the emotion expressed by a target to two comparison stimuli, one neutral and one emotional. Angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and sad facial expressions of varying intensity were used. Although older adults took longer to respond than younger adults, younger adults only outmatched older adults for the lowest intensity disgust and fear expressions. Some participants also completed an identity matching task in which target stimuli were matched on personal identity instead of emotion. Although irrelevant to the judgment, expressed emotion still created interference. All participants were less accurate when the apparent difference in expressive intensity of the matched stimuli was large, suggesting that salient emotion cues increased difficulty of identity matching. Age differences in emotion perception were limited to very low intensity expressions.

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.

Adult age-differences in subjective impression of emotional faces are reflected in emotion-related attention and memory tasks

Although younger and older adults appear to attend to and remember emotional faces differently, less is known about age-related differences in the subjective emotional impression (arousal, potency, and valence) of emotional faces and how these differences, in turn, are reflected in age differences in various emotional tasks. In the current study, we used the same facial emotional stimuli (angry and happy faces) in four tasks: emotional rating, attention, categorical perception, and visual short-term memory (VSTM). The aim of this study was to investigate effects of age on the subjective emotional impression of angry and happy faces and to examine whether any age differences were mirrored in measures of emotional behavior (attention, categorical perception, and memory). In addition, regression analyses were used to further study impression-behavior associations. Forty younger adults (range 20-30 years) and thirty-nine older adults (range 65-75 years) participated in the experiment. The emotional rating task showed that older adults perceived less arousal, potency, and valence than younger adults and that the difference was more pronounced for angry than happy faces. Similarly, the results of the attention and memory tasks demonstrated interaction effects between emotion and age, and age differences on these measures were larger for angry than for happy faces. Regression analyses confirmed that in both age groups, higher potency ratings predicted both visual search and VSTM efficiency. Future studies should consider the possibility that age differences in the subjective emotional impression of facial emotional stimuli may explain age differences in attention to and memory of such stimuli.

Age and Gender Differences in Emotion Recognition

Frontiers in Psychology

Background: Existing literature suggests that age affects recognition of affective facial expressions. Eye-tracking studies highlighted that age-related differences in recognition of emotions could be explained by different face exploration patterns due to attentional impairment. Gender also seems to play a role in recognition of emotions. Unfortunately, little is known about the differences in emotion perception abilities across lifespans for men and women, even if females show more ability from infancy. Objective: The present study aimed to examine the role of age and gender on facial emotion recognition in relation to neuropsychological functions and face exploration strategies. We also aimed to explore the associations between emotion recognition and quality of life. Methods: 60 healthy people were consecutively enrolled in the study and divided into two groups: Younger Adults and Older Adults. Participants were assessed for: emotion recognition, attention abilities, frontal functioning, memory functioning and quality of life satisfaction. During the execution of the emotion recognition test using the Pictures of Facial Affects (PoFA) and a modified version of PoFA (M-PoFA), subject's eye movements were recorded with an Eye Tracker. Results: Significant differences between younger and older adults were detected for fear recognition when adjusted for cognitive functioning and eye-gaze fixations characteristics. Adjusted means of fear recognition were significantly higher in the younger group than in the older group. With regard to gender's effects, old females recognized identical pairs of emotions better than old males. Considering the Satisfaction Profile (SAT-P) we detected negative correlations between some dimensions (Physical functioning, Sleep/feeding/free time) and emotion recognition (i.e., sadness, and disgust). Conclusion: The current study provided novel insights into the specific mechanisms that may explain differences in emotion recognition, examining how age and gender differences can be outlined by cognitive functioning and face exploration strategies.

Age differences in recognition of emotion in lexical stimuli and facial expressions

Psychology and Aging, 2007

Age differences in emotion recognition from lexical stimuli and facial expressions were examined in a cross-sectional sample of adults aged 18 to 85 (N ϭ 357). Emotion-specific response biases differed by age: Older adults were disproportionately more likely to incorrectly label lexical stimuli as happiness, sadness, and surprise and to incorrectly label facial stimuli as disgust and fear. After these biases were controlled, findings suggested that older adults were less accurate at identifying emotions than were young adults, but the pattern differed across emotions and task types. The lexical task showed stronger age differences than the facial task, and for lexical stimuli, age groups differed in accuracy for all emotional states except fear. For facial stimuli, in contrast, age groups differed only in accuracy for anger, disgust, fear, and happiness. Implications for age-related changes in different types of emotional processing are discussed.

Emotion, 2009

Experimental studies indicate that recognition of emotions, particularly negative emotions, decreases with age. However, there is no consensus at which age the decrease in emotion recognition begins, how selective this is to negative emotions, and whether this applies to both facial and vocal expression. In the current cross-sectional study, 607 participants ranging in age from 18 to 84 years (mean age ϭ 32.6 Ϯ 14.9 years) were asked to recognize emotions expressed either facially or vocally. In general, older participants were found to be less accurate at recognizing emotions, with the most distinctive age difference pertaining to a certain group of negative emotions. Both modalities revealed an age-related decline in the recognition of sadness and-to a lesser degree-anger, starting at about 30 years of age. Although age-related differences in the recognition of expression of emotion were not mediated by personality traits, 2 of the Big 5 traits, openness and conscientiousness, made an independent contribution to emotion-recognition performance. Implications of age-related differences in facial and vocal emotion expression and early onset of the selective decrease in emotion recognition are discussed in terms of previous findings and relevant theoretical models.

Age Effects on Emotion Recognition in Facial Displays: From 20 to 89 Years of Age

Experimental Aging Research, 2012

Background=Study Context: An emotion recognition task that morphs emotional facial expressions from an initial neutral expression to distinct increments of the full emotional expression was administered to 482 individuals, 20 to 89 years of age. Methods: Participants assessed six basic emotions at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the full facial expression. Results: Participants in the three oldest age groups (60s, 70s, and 80s) demonstrated decreased performance for the recognition of the fear, anger, and sad emotions. Increased age was associated with increased recognition rates for the disgust expression, whereas no age effect was detected for the happy and surprise expressions. Covariate analyses revealed age effects were reduced by processing speed, but were unaffected by decision-making ability. The effects of age on individual emotions and levels of presentation are discussed. Conclusion: These findings suggest that age has the greatest impact on the recognition of the sad emotion and the greatest age effect at the 50% level of presentation across the adult life span. Age Effects on Emotion Recognition 3 empirical advances (pp. 101-118).

Age differences in emotion recognition skills and the visual scanning of emotion faces

2007

Research suggests that a person's emotion recognition declines with advancing years. We examined whether or not this age-related decline was attributable to a tendency to overlook emotion information in the eyes. In Experiment 1, younger adults were significantly better than older adults at inferring emotions from full faces and eyes, though not from mouths. Using an eye tracker in Experiment 2, we found young adults, in comparison with older adults, to have superior emotion recognition performance and to look proportionately more to eyes than mouths. However, although better emotion recognition performance was significantly correlated with more eye looking in younger adults, the same was not true in older adults. We discuss these results in terms of brain changes with age.

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