Older adults get masked emotion priming for happy but not angry faces: evidence for a positivity effect in early perceptual processing of emotional signals

Simonetti, Simone; Davis, Chris; Kim, Jeesun

doi:10.1080/02699931.2022.2138269

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 52 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…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

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%