Music to my ears: Age-related decline in musical and facial emotion recognition.

Abstract

We investigated young-old differences in emotion recognition using music and face stimuli and tested explanatory hypotheses regarding older adults' typically worse emotion recognition. In Experiment 1, young and older adults labeled emotions in an established set of faces, and in classical piano stimuli that we pilot-tested on other young and older adults. Older adults were worse at detecting anger, sadness, fear, and happiness in music. Performance on the music and face emotion tasks was not correlated for either age group. Because musical expressions of fear were not equated for age groups in the pilot study of Experiment 1, we conducted a second experiment in which we created a novel set of music stimuli that included more accessible musical styles, and which we again pilot-tested on young and older adults. In this pilot study, all musical emotions were identified similarly by young and older adults. In Experiment 2, participants also made age estimations in another set of faces to examine whether potential relations between the face and music emotion tasks would be shared with the age estimation task. Older adults did worse in each of the tasks, and had specific difficulty recognizing happy, sad, peaceful, angry, and fearful music clips. Older adults' difficulties in each of the 3 tasks-music emotion, face emotion, and face age-were not correlated with each other. General cognitive decline did not appear to explain our results as increasing age predicted emotion performance even after fluid IQ was controlled for within the older adult group. (PsycINFO Database Record

Visual analogue mood scale scores in healthy young versus older adults

“…word-only) VAMS, which are more appropriate for non-clinical adult populations, particularly when comparisons are being made between young and older adults as recognition of facial expressions declines with healthy aging (e.g. Zhao et al, 2016;Sutcliffe et al, 2017).…”

Music for Relaxation: A Comparison Across Two Age Groups

“…Previous research investigating differential responses to music in a younger and older population has shown differences in emotional evaluation of music: Older adults seem less sensitive 6 to emotional expressions in music than younger adults. In particular, lower recognition rates in older compared to younger adults have been found for emotional expressions of sadness and fear (Laukka & Juslin, 2007;Lima & Castro, 2011), and, in some studies, also for expressions of happiness and peacefulness (Sutcliffe, Rendell, Henry, Bailey, & Ruffman, 2017). Vieillard and Gilet (2013) extended the investigation to the emotional experience of music and found a stronger tendency in older adults to experience happiness in music.…”

Are Older Adults’ Difficulties on Emotion Recognition and Theory of Mind Tasks Due to a Decline in General Cognitive Ability?

“…Further compounding the di culty in interpreting previous ndings, there are important differences in the way in which researchers have indexed general cognition by using tests of speed, working memory, or uid intelligence, as well as the tasks used to measure each of these abilities. Whereas it might be more informative to include multiple tests tapping different aspects of general cognitive abilities, 9 of 14 studies that have examined whether age effects are independent of general cognition have included a single task to measure a single cognitive ability 13,[18][19][20][21]25,28,30 . Likewise, 9 of 14 studies have included a single task to measure social cognition 13,15,16,18,[27][28][29][30][31] .…”

“…There are a number of studies that have obtained correlations between general cognition and ER, either in a sample of older adults, or over a group of young and older adults [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] . There are also some studies that have not obtained signi cant correlations [23][24][25] .…”