A meta-analytic review of emotion recognition and aging: implications for neuropsychological models of aging

Positive gaze preferences in older adults: assessing the role of cognitive effort with pupil dilation

Older adults display positive preferences in their gaze, consistent with their prioritization of emotion regulation goals. While some research has argued that substantial amounts of cognitive effort are necessary for these information-processing preferences to occur, other work suggests that these attentional patterns unfold with minimal cognitive exertion. The current study used an implicit regulatory context (i.e., viewing facial stimuli of varying emotions) to assess how much cognitive effort was required for positive attentional preferences to occur. Effortful cognitive processing was assessed with a direct measure of change in pupil dilation. Results indicated that minimal cognitive effort was expended when older adults engaged in positive gaze preferences. This finding suggests that gaze acts as a rather effortless and economical regulatory tool for individuals to shape their affective experience.

EMOTION RECOGNITION OF VIRTUAL AGENTS FACIAL EXPRESSIONS: THE EFFECTS OF AGE AND EMOTION INTENSITY

People make determinations about the social characteristics of an agent (e.g., robot or virtual agent) by interpreting social cues displayed by the agent, such as facial expressions. Although a considerable amount of research has been conducted investigating age-related differences in emotion recognition of human faces (e.g., Sullivan, & Ruffman, 2004), the effect of age on emotion identification of virtual agent facial expressions has been largely unexplored. Age-related differences in emotion recognition of facial expressions are an important factor to consider in the design of agents that may assist older adults in a recreational or healthcare setting. The purpose of the current research was to investigate whether age-related differences in facial emotion recognition can extend to emotion-expressive virtual agents. Younger and older adults performed a recognition task with a virtual agent expressing six basic emotions. Larger age-related differences were expected for virtual agents displaying negative emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. In fact, the results indicated that older adults showed a decrease in emotion recognition accuracy for a virtual agent's emotions of anger, fear, and happiness.

Threat perception in mild cognitive impairment and early dementia

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia affect many aspects of emotion processing. Even though the ability to detect threat is a particularly important aspect of emotion processing, no study to date has assessed threat perception in either of these groups. The purpose of the present study was to test whether individuals with MCI (n = 38) and mild dementia (n = 34) have difficulty differentiating between faces and situations normatively judged to be either high or low in threat relative to age-matched controls (n = 34). To achieve this aim, all participants completed 2 danger rating tasks that involved viewing and rating high- and low-danger images. It was also assessed whether threat perception was related to cognitive functioning and emotion recognition. The results indicated that all 3 groups were accurately, and comparably, able to differentiate high from low-danger faces. However, the dementia group had difficulties differentiating high from low-danger situations, which reflected a bias to overattribute the level of threat posed by normatively judged nonthreatening situations. This difficulty was related to more general cognitive decline.

Young and older emotional faces: are there age group differences in expression identification and memory?

Studies have found that older compared with young adults are less able to identify facial expressions and have worse memory for negative than for positive faces, but those studies have used only young faces. Studies finding that both age groups are more accurate at recognizing faces of their own than other ages have used mostly neutral faces. Thus, age differences in processing faces may not extend to older faces, and preferential memory for own age faces may not extend to emotional faces. To investigate these possibilities, young and older participants viewed young and older faces presented either with happy, angry, or neutral expressions; participants identified the expressions displayed and then completed a surprise face recognition task. Older compared with young participants were less able to identify expressions of angry young and older faces and (based on participants' categorizations) remembered angry faces less well than happy faces. There was no evidence of an own age bias in memory, but self-reported frequency of contact with young and older adults and awareness of own emotions played a role in expression identification of and memory for young and older faces.

It's not what you play, it's how you play it: timbre affects perception of emotion in music

Salient sensory experiences often have a strong emotional tone, but the neuropsychological relations between perceptual characteristics of sensory objects and the affective information they convey remain poorly defined. Here we addressed the relationship between sound identity and emotional information using music. In two experiments, we investigated whether perception of emotions is influenced by altering the musical instrument on which the music is played, independently of other musical features. In the first experiment, 40 novel melodies each representing one of four emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, or anger) were each recorded on four different instruments (an electronic synthesizer, a piano, a violin, and a trumpet), controlling for melody, tempo, and loudness between instruments. Healthy participants (23 young adults aged 18–30 years, 24 older adults aged 58–75 years) were asked to select which emotion they thought each musical stimulus represented in a four-alternative forced-choice task. Using a generalized linear mixed model we found a significant interaction between instrument and emotion judgement with a similar pattern in young and older adults (p < .0001 for each age group). The effect was not attributable to musical expertise. In the second experiment using the same melodies and experimental design, the interaction between timbre and perceived emotion was replicated (p < .05) in another group of young adults for novel synthetic timbres designed to incorporate timbral cues to particular emotions. Our findings show that timbre (instrument identity) independently affects the perception of emotions in music after controlling for other acoustic, cognitive, and performance factors.

Reduced ability to detect facial configuration in middle-aged and elderly individuals: associations with spatiotemporal visual processing

Visual sensitivity decreases with age, and this presumably has an impact on face recognition. However, the relationship between aging in basic visual processing and in the sensory and cognitive mechanisms mediating face recognition is not well understood. Face detection, a foundational step in recognizing faces, relies primarily on sensory information. This study measured the ability to detect facial configuration and contrast detection in young (<40 years), middle-aged (40-59 years), and elderly adults (>59 years). Performance on both face detection and contrast detection was moderately degraded in the middle-aged group compared with the young group and was further degraded in elderly adults. Face detection was correlated strongly with contrast sensitivities, but only weakly with verbal IQ. The results suggest that face detection ability begins to reduce in early aging, and is associated with spatiotemporal visual processing.

Evidence for deficits in facial affect recognition and theory of mind in multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a white matter disease associated with neurocognitive difficulties. More recently the potential for white matter pathology to also disrupt important aspects of emotion understanding has been recognized. However, no study to date has assessed whether capacity for facial affect recognition and theory of mind (ToM) is disrupted in MS, or whether any observed deficits are related to more general cognitive impairment. In the present study MS participants (n = 27) and nonclinical controls (n = 30) were administered measures of facial affect recognition, ToM, and cognitive functioning. MS participants were significantly impaired on the ToM task, and also presented with specific deficits decoding facial emotions of anger and fear. Performance on the measures of facial affect recognition and ToM were related to general cognitive functioning, and in particular, measures sensitive to executive dysfunction and information processing speed. These data highlight the need for future research to more fully delineate the extent and implications of emotion understanding difficulties in this population.

Older adults respond quickly to angry faces despite labeling difficulty

Two experiments examined young-old differences in speed of identifying emotion faces and labeling of emotion expressions. In Experiment 1, participants were presented arrays of 9 faces in which all faces were identical (neutral expression) or 1 was different (angry, sad, or happy). Both young and older adults were faster identifying faces as "different" when a discrepant face expressed anger than when it expressed sadness or happiness, and this was true whether the faces were schematics or photographs of real people. In Experiment 2, participants labeled the Experiment 1 schematic and real faces. Older adults were significantly worse than young when labeling angry schematic faces, and angry and sad real faces. Together, this research indicates no age differences in identifying discrepant angry faces from an array, although older adults do have difficulty choosing the correct emotion label for angry faces.

Effects of the AMPA receptor modulator S 18986 on measures of cognition and oxidative stress in aged rats

RATIONALE

Development of cognitive-enhancing drugs that delay or halt mild cognitive impairment progression to Alzheimer's disease would be of great benefit.

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this study was to examine the ability of (S)-2,3-dihydro-[3,4]-cyclopentano-1,2,4-benzothiadiazine-1,1-dioxide (S 18986), a positive allosteric modulator of alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) receptors, to improve behavioral performance and alleviate age-related deficits in oxidative stress status in the prelimbic cortex and hippocampus.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Daily administration of S 18986 (0.1, 0.3, and 1.0 mg/kg) or vehicle was given to separate groups of male rats starting at 12 months of age. Additionally, daily vehicle administration was given to a group of rats starting at 3 months of age. Four months after initiation of drug administration, rats were trained and tested in an operant-delayed alternation task and a reinforcer devaluation task. Upon completion of testing, oxidative stress status was assessed in the prelimbic cortex and hippocampus.

RESULTS

S 18986 dose-dependently altered responses in the reinforcer devaluation task such that aged rats came to resemble young rats. There were no age or drug effects in the operant-delayed alternation task. Levels of the lipid peroxidation product 4-hydroxy-nonenal (HNE) were increased, and Cu/Zn-superoxide dismutase (SOD) levels were decreased in prelimbic cortex in aged rats, changes that were reversed by S 18986. Similarly, age-related increases in hippocampal HNE levels were prevented by S 18986.

CONCLUSIONS

Positive modulation of AMPA receptor activity may be a therapeutic approach to halt or slow progression of mild cognitive impairment via improvement in oxidative stress status in the hippocampus and prelimbic cortex.