Mood Recognition Across the Ages

Abstract

A cross-sectional study was conducted in which level of mood recognition was assessed from early childhood through old age. Asymptotic performance was obtained on facial affect recognitions tasks from ages 3-34 yrs. There was a progressive decline in facial affect recognitions beginning at age 45, with the principal problem that of recognizing angry faces. With respect to auditory prosody, there was an improvement in recognition level from ages 3-12 yrs. Performance remained asymptotic through age 43 and then began to decline increasingly beyond age 45.

Is Age-related Decline in Vocal Emotion Identification an Artefact of Labelling Cognitions?

“…Further research could perhaps include samples of middle-aged adults as in Brosgole et al's early labelling studies (Allen & Brosgole, 1993;Brosgole & Weisman, 1995), to map the gradual decline of these functions between younger and older adults, whilst examining discrimination judgements and responses to non-emotional prosody. One interpretation of our data is that older adults may have a generic difficulty deriving overall communicative intent from the prosodic ensemble.…”

Age-related decline in the ability to decode emotional prosody: Primary or secondary phenomenon?

“…The literature that does exist is somewhat inconsistent. According to Brosgole and Weisman (1995), the ability to decode emotional prosody reaches an asymptote at age 12 which is maintained until middle age (mid 40s), following which the ability declines until beyond age 65, where emotional prosodic processing resembles that of 3-6 year olds. In Brosgole and Weisman's study participants were presented with pre-recorded sentences and asked to indicate their response in a forced choice response paradigm, pointing to the drawing of the face displaying the corresponding 4 Decoding emotional prosody… emotion in one condition, and giving a verbal forced-choice response in the labeling condition.…”

“…The early report from Allen and Brosgole (1993) highlighted evidence for agerelated decline in emotional AND linguistic prosodic processing. In this study participants judged emotional prosody using the same paradigm as Brosgole and Weisman (1995). In the linguistic prosody task participants heard pre-recorded neutral commands, statements or questions.…”

Older adults' decoding of emotions: Role of dynamic versus static cues and age-related cognitive decline.

“…It has been widely demonstrated that older adults have more difficulty than young adults in identifying negative social emotions (such as anger, fear, and sadness; Brosgole & Weisman, 1995;Calder et al, 2003;Keightley, Winocur, Burianova, Hongwanishkul, & Grady, 2006;Ruffman et al, 2008). However, there is not a clear understanding as to why that might be (for review, see Ruffman et al, 2008).…”