Compensating for age limits through emotional crossmodal integration

Abstract

Social interactions in daily life necessitate the integration of social signals from different sensory modalities. In the aging literature, it is well established that the recognition of emotion in facial expressions declines with advancing age, and this also occurs with vocal expressions. By contrast, crossmodal integration processing in healthy aging individuals is less documented. Here, we investigated the age-related effects on emotion recognition when faces and voices were presented alone or simultaneously, allowing for crossmodal integration. In this study, 31 young adults (M = 25.8 years) and 31 older adults (M = 67.2 years) were instructed to identify several basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and a neutral expression, which were displayed as visual (facial expressions), auditory (non-verbal affective vocalizations) or crossmodal (simultaneous, congruent facial and vocal affective expressions) stimuli. The results showed that older adults performed slower and worse than younger adults at recognizing negative emotions from isolated faces and voices. In the crossmodal condition, although slower, older adults were as accurate as younger except for anger. Importantly, additional analyses using the “race model” demonstrate that older adults benefited to the same extent as younger adults from the combination of facial and vocal emotional stimuli. These results help explain some conflicting results in the literature and may clarify emotional abilities related to daily life that are partially spared among older adults.

Effects of aging on emotion recognition from dynamic multimodal expressions and vocalizations

“…For example, Lima et al 25 investigated anger, amusement, disgust, fear, pleasure, relief, sadness, and triumph vocalizations. In contrast to some previous studies that have reported age impairments for recognition of negative vocalizations and anger in particular 21 , 26 , Lima et al 25 instead reported age-related differences for all emotions regardless of valence. These results suggest that age impairments can also emerge for positive emotions (i.e., amusement, pleasure, relief, triumph) when more than one positive emotion is included 25 .…”

The Influence of Negative Emotion on Cognitive and Emotional Control Remains Intact in Aging

“…An important implication of the current findings is that healthy older adults preserve the ability to process conflicting emotional information (e.g., in irony; Wang et al, 2007 ; Pexman, 2008 ; Watanabe et al, 2014 ; Zinchenko et al, 2015 ). In this regard, it was shown that the correct recognition of emotional states facilitates social behavior and interpersonal communication ( Shimokawa et al, 2001 ; Blair, 2005 ; Chaby et al, 2015 ). Therefore, the present results provide an important contribution to understanding of changes in emotional competencies in healthy aging ( Doerwald et al, 2016 ).…”

“…For instance, simple vocalizations can describe people’s emotions, feelings, and even social attitudes ( Mohammadi and Vinciarelli, 2011 ). Therefore, the ability to accurately perceive emotional vocalizations is an important aspect of social communication and hampered recognition of emotional states may lead to inappropriate social behavior and poor interpersonal communication ( Shimokawa et al, 2001 ; Blair, 2005 ; Chaby et al, 2015 ). However, this task becomes even more challenging when there is conflicting emotional information, for instance, when the affective meaning of vocal and facial expressions are incongruent (e.g., in irony; Wang et al, 2007 ; Pexman, 2008 ; Watanabe et al, 2014 ; Zinchenko et al, 2015 ).…”

“…Conversely, some studies showed that older adults display decreased accuracy in emotion recognition portrayed in facial expressions (pictures of emotional faces; e.g., Williams et al, 2009 ; Orgeta, 2010 ; Lambrecht et al, 2012 ), conveyed through prosodic cues ( Kiss and Ennis, 2001 ; Paulmann et al, 2009 ; Mitchell et al, 2011 ; Lambrecht et al, 2012 ; Templier et al, 2015 ) and, particularly, through non-verbal vocal cues (e.g., screams or laughter; Hunter et al, 2010 ; Lima et al, 2014 ; Chaby et al, 2015 ).…”

Speaking with a Happy Voice Makes You Sound Younger

“…By doing so, the information regarding a speaker's emotion would be received through auditory and visual senses. Therefore, it is surprising that the effect of emotional voices on speakers' age perception remains unexplored, although most researchers have explored the effect of aging on cognitive mechanisms: age differences on cross-modal emotional matching and identification (Hunter, Phillips, & MacPherson, 2010); age-related effects on emotion recognition (Chaby Luherne-du Boullay, Chetouani, & Plaza, 2015); speakers' perceived ages with reading voice (Ptacek & Sander, 1966); subjective age estimation of telephone voices (Cerrato, Falcone, & Paoloni, 2000); the accuracy of estimates of speaker age (Eriksson, Green, Sjöstrom, Sullivan, & Zetterholm, 2004); influences of speech rate and speech spontaneity on estimation of speaker age (Waller, Eriksson, & Sörqvist, 2015).…”