Face Age and Eye Gaze Influence Older Adults' Emotion Recognition (original) (raw)
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Age-related changes in the integration of gaze direction and facial expressions of emotion
Emotion, 2010
Gaze direction influences younger adults' perception of emotional expressions, with direct gaze enhancing the perception of anger and joy, while averted gaze enhances the perception of fear. Age-related declines in emotion recognition and eye-gaze processing have been reported, indicating that there may be age-related changes in the ability to integrate these facial cues. As there is evidence of a positivity bias with age, age-related difficulties integrating these cues may be greatest for negative emotions. The present research investigated age differences in the extent to which gaze direction influenced explicit perception (e.g., anger, fear and joy; Study 1) and social judgments (e.g., of approachability; Study 2) of emotion faces. Gaze direction did not influence the perception of fear in either age group. In both studies, age differences were found in the extent to which gaze direction influenced judgments of angry and joyful faces, with older adults showing less integration of gaze and emotion cues than younger adults. Age differences were greatest when interpreting angry expressions. Implications of these findings for older adults' social functioning are discussed.
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.
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).
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.
Aging and Attentional Biases for Emotional Faces
Psychological Science, 2003
We examined age differences in attention to and memory for faces expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. Participants saw a pair of faces, one emotional and one neutral, and then a dot probe that appeared in the location of one of the faces. In two experiments, older adults responded faster to the dot if it was presented on the same side as a neutral face than if it was presented on the same side as a negative face. Younger adults did not exhibit this attentional bias. Interactions of age and valence were also found for memory for the faces, with older adults remembering positive better than negative faces. These findings reveal that in their initial attention, older adults avoid negative information. This attentional bias is consistent with older adults' generally better emotional well-being and their tendency to remember negative less well than positive information.
Age and Motivation Predict Gaze Behavior for Facial Expressions
Psychology and Aging, 2011
This study investigated age-related differences between younger (M ϭ 25.52 years) and older (M ϭ 70.51 years) adults in avoidance motivation and the influence of avoidance motivation on gaze preferences for happy, neutral, and angry faces. In line with the hypothesis of reduced negativity effect later in life, older adults avoided angry faces and (to a lesser degree) preferred happy faces more than younger adults did. This effect cannot be explained by age-related changes in dispositional motivation. Irrespective of age, avoidance motivation predicted gaze behavior towards emotional faces. The study demonstrates the importance of interindividual differences beyond young adulthood.
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.
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.
Psychology and aging, 2014
Gaze following is the primary means of establishing joint attention with others and is subject to age-related decline. In addition, young but not older adults experience an own-age bias in gaze following. The current research assessed the effects of subconscious processing on these age-related differences. Participants responded to targets that were either congruent or incongruent with the direction of gaze displayed in supraliminal and subliminal images of young and older faces. These faces displayed either neutral (Study 1) or happy and fearful (Study 2) expressions. In Studies 1 and 2, both age groups demonstrated gaze-directed attention by responding faster to targets that were congruent as opposed to incongruent with gaze-cues. In Study 1, subliminal stimuli did not attenuate the age-related decline in gaze-cuing, but did result in an own-age bias among older participants. In Study 2, gaze-cuing was reduced for older relative to young adults in response to supraliminal stimuli,...
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.