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

Abstract

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 = 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 recognition in music changes across the adult life span

“…The pattern of the observed changes in emotion recognition is consistent with previous findings (e.g., Calder et al, 2003;Isaacowitz et al, 2007). The decline in responsiveness to sad and scared music replicates Laukka and Juslin's (2007) findings with older adults, and extends them by showing that this decline (a) occurs for music portraying emotions through structural features and not through expressiveness, and (b) is manifest at middle-age (ca.…”

“…The decline in the recognition of fear started early, at around 40 years, and increased linearly with advancing age. More recently, Isaacowitz et al (2007) have also found age-related decline for fearful and angry expressions, and no decline for sad, surprised and neutral expressions. Consistent with Calder et al's results, the recognition of fear declined linearly with age.…”

“…However, several questions remain open. First, it is unknown whether these changes start around middle-age, as it is the case for faces and speech prosody (Paulmann et al, 2008;Isaacowitz et al, 2007). Second, it is also unknown whether these changes occur in response to stimuli where emotions are portrayed mainly through structural features, such as tempo or harmony in different musical excerpts, instead of the expressiveness proper of the same excerpt interpreted in different moods.…”

“…The task presented to the participants requires them to perform graded ratings on the perceived intensity of the four possible emotions, for each musical excerpt. In comparison with forced-choice single categorization, this task is less prone to responses biases (Isaacowitz et al, 2007). It has been used in studies on the recognition of facial expressions and speech prosody (Adolphs, Damasio, & Tranel, 2002;Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 2001) and musical emotions (Gosselin et al, 2005;Gosselin et al, 2007).…”

Familial covariation of facial emotion recognition and IQ in schizophrenia

“…As previous research demonstrated that age (Isaacowitz et al, 2007) and gender (Donges et al, 2012) have impact on facial emotion recognition performance, their potential confounding effect was controlled for in all further analyses. Afterwards, all analyses on DFAR performance were adjusted for general facial recognition ability (BFRT).…”