Emotional information processing in young and older adults: meta-analysis reveals faces elicit distinct biases

Nasrollahi, Neda; Jowett, Tim; Machado, Liana

doi:10.1007/s10433-021-00676-w

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…In normal aging, this negativity bias decreases and even tends to shift toward a positivity bias with a preference for positive stimuli compared with both negative and neutral stimuli (Nasrollahi et al, 2022; Reed et al, 2014) although this bias may be modulated depending on the considered stimuli type (Nasrollahi et al, 2022). Charles and collaborators (Charles et al, 2003) showed that older adults better recall positive scenes than negative scenes compared with young people.…”

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confidence: 99%

Spatio-temporal attention toward emotional scenes across adulthood.

Poncet¹,

Nicolas²,

Guyader³

et al. 2023

Emotion

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Research on emotion suggests that the attentional preference observed toward the negative stimuli in young adults tends to disappear in normal aging and, sometimes, to shift toward a preference for positive stimuli. The current eye-tracking study investigated visual exploration of paired natural scenes of different valence (Negative–Neutral, Positive–Neutral, and Negative–Positive pairs) in three age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults). Two arousal levels of stimuli (high and low arousal) were also considered given role of this factor in age-related effects on emotion. Results showed the automatic attentional orienting toward the negative stimuli was relatively preserved in our three age groups although reduced in the elderly, in both arousal conditions. A similar negativity bias was also observed in initial attention focusing but shifted toward a positivity bias over time in the three age groups. Moreover, it appeared the spatial exploration of emotional scenes evolved over time differently for older adults compared with other age groups. No difference between young adults and middle-aged adults in ocular behavior was observed. This study confirms the interest of studying both spatial and temporal characteristics of oculomotor behaviors to better understand the age-related effects on emotion.

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confidence: 99%

Spatio-temporal attention toward emotional scenes across adulthood.

Poncet¹,

Nicolas²,

Guyader³

et al. 2023

Emotion

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“…The use of standardized assessment batteries, including computerized measurements, has been particularly beneficial for characterizing age-related stability and change in cognitive aging and delineating relationships between cognitive components [33]. In contrast, operational definitions and measurements of central concepts in social-cognitive aging are more inconsistent across studies, which makes meta-analytic consensus challenging [15,34]. For example, social behavior has received very little empirical attention with relevance to aging (but see some research on social inappropriateness, which has been associated with increases in normal and neurodegenerative aging [4,35]).…”

Section: Achieving Consensus On Operationalization and Analysis Of So...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Age-related differences in emotion identification are qualified by contextual specificities and characteristics of experimental tasks. This includes specific emotions (e.g., anger, sadness, fear) being particularly difficult to distinguish [14,15]. Age-related neural alterations such as decreased white matter integrity of the fusiform gyrus are associated with age-related decline in emotion identification [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relatively greater accuracy in identifying disgust is associated with greater insula activity in older adults [16] and may reflect an age-related shift away from the eyes and towards the mouth in face processing [18]. Comparatively less well understood are impacts of other stimulus features such as facial age and race/ethnicity [19] or non-facial social information [15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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New Directions for Studying the Aging Social-Cognitive Brain

Ebner,

Horta,

El-Shafie

2023

Preprint

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The study of social cognition has extended across the lifespan with a recent special focus on the impacts of aging on the social-cognitive brain. This review summarizes current knowledge on social perception, theory of mind, empathy, and social behavior from a social-cognitive neuroscience of aging perspective; and identifies new directions for studying the aging social-cognitive brain. These new directions highlight the need for (i) standardized operationalization and analysis of social-cognitive constructs; (ii) use of naturalistic paradigms to enhance ecological validity of social-cognitive measures; (iii) application of repeated assessments via single-N designs for robust delineation of social-cognitive processes in the aging brain; and (iv) increased representation of vulnerable aging populations in social-cognitive brain research to enhance diversity and generalizability.

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“…The development of these theories of older adult emotion recognition is driven by discoveries about the factors that modulate older adults' recognition performance. A good example is the finding that older adults are not uniformly poor at recognising emotion; they tend to be better at recognising a positive expression like happy and worse at recognising a negative one like angry (the positivity effect, see [8] for a recent meta-analysis; for a discussion of the flip side of this effect, the negativity effect, see [9]). This finding plays a central role in prominent motivation-based theories that explain the positivity effect in terms of older adults prioritising goals to boost the prominence of emotionally gratifying information [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Older adults’ emotion recognition: No auditory-visual benefit for less clear expressions

2022

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The ability to recognise emotion from faces or voices appears to decline with advancing age. However, some studies have shown that emotion recognition of auditory-visual (AV) expressions is largely unaffected by age, i.e., older adults get a larger benefit from AV presentation than younger adults resulting in similar AV recognition levels. An issue with these studies is that they used well-recognised emotional expressions that are unlikely to generalise to real-life settings. To examine if an AV emotion recognition benefit generalizes across well and less well recognised stimuli, we conducted an emotion recognition study using expressions that had clear or unclear emotion information for both modalities, or clear visual, but unclear auditory information. Older (n = 30) and younger (n = 30) participants were tested on stimuli of anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust (expressed in spoken sentences) in auditory-only (AO), visual-only (VO), or AV format. Participants were required to respond by choosing one of 5 emotion options. Younger adults were more accurate in recognising emotions than older adults except for clear VO expressions. Younger adults showed an AV benefit even when unimodal recognition was poor. No such AV benefit was found for older adults; indeed, AV was worse than VO recognition when AO recognition was poor. Analyses of confusion responses indicated that older adults generated more confusion responses that were common between AO and VO conditions, than younger adults. We propose that older adults’ poorer AV performance may be due to a combination of weak auditory emotion recognition and response uncertainty that resulted in a higher cognitive load.

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Emotional information processing in young and older adults: meta-analysis reveals faces elicit distinct biases

Cited by 4 publications

References 48 publications

Spatio-temporal attention toward emotional scenes across adulthood.

Spatio-temporal attention toward emotional scenes across adulthood.

New Directions for Studying the Aging Social-Cognitive Brain

Older adults’ emotion recognition: No auditory-visual benefit for less clear expressions

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