Beyond “happy, angry, or sad?”: Age-of-poser and age-of-rater effects on multi-dimensional emotion perception

Age Differences in Mental State Inference of Sarcasm: Contributions of Facial Emotion Recognition and Cognitive Performance

OBJECTIVES

Older age is associated with poorer ability to accurately infer mental states, but some mental states are more complex than others. Sarcasm is a complex mental state because the literal and intended meaning of a speaker's words are in opposition. Individuals must rely on additional cues (e.g., facial expressions, intonation) for accurate inference. We hypothesized that understanding of sarcastic versus sincere exchanges would be more sensitive to age-related difficulty in mental state understanding.

METHODS

We examined accuracy at identifying sarcasm among 263 adults (ages 18-90 years) using videos of social interactions in The Awareness of Social Inference Test. Hypotheses were tested using a logistic linear mixed effects model predicting correct/incorrect trial-level responses. To characterize why sarcasm differed with age, we measured 2 abilities commonly implicated in mental state understanding: facial emotion recognition and cognitive performance.

RESULTS

Sarcasm understanding declined with age, whereas understanding of sincere exchanges did not. Both better emotion recognition and cognitive performance related to better understanding of sarcastic but not sincere exchanges. Only cognitive performance showed an age-related effect such that the cognitive performance among the oldest participants facilitated their understanding of both sarcastic and sincere exchanges.

DISCUSSION

We showed that individual variation related to age and social and cognitive performance is more pronounced when the use of multiple mental state cues is more (sarcasm) or less (sincerity) necessary for accurate understanding of social interactions. Naturalistic paradigms involving multiple mental state cues can address important questions about how older adults make decisions in the real world.

Unlocking the language: Key features of emotions

Various scientific works indicate different features of emotions as criterial attributes. The aim of this article is to identify the key features of emotions by drawing from various theoretical approaches and utilizing language to identify as many states as possible that meet these criteria. The snowball procedure was used in the research. The initial stage involved selecting key articles (with the highest number of citations in the Web of Science database). Consequently, 72 definitions of emotions were chosen. The definitions' content has been analyzed for criterial attributes of emotions. Eight criteria were proposed as a result of this analysis, representing the fundamental characteristics of emotions according to the collected definitions. Next, an attempt was made to examine the practical understanding and applicability of the identified criterial attributes of emotions. Seven judges examined a comprehensive list of states recognized as emotional and independently assessed which of them met all the selected criteria. In the final stage, their agreement was checked using correlation-based coefficients and a coefficient that takes into account the likelihood of random judge decisions. The article has shown that utilizing language makes it potentially possible to generate a list of emotions that meet the criteria derived from various theoretical approaches.

Do you look longer at attractive faces? It depends on what you are looking for

Evolutionary psychology suggests that we are attuned to relevant information in the environment. For example, attention may be attracted by physical beauty because it is important for finding a partner with good reproductive health. Consistently, previous studies found that attention stayed longer on attractive than unattractive faces. We asked whether this tendency was automatic and varied participants' implicit search intentions to be either consistent or inconsistent with the presumably automatic tendency to attend to attractive faces. To create an implicit intention to look at attractive faces, participants searched for a happy face in an array of neutral faces because happy faces are rated as more attractive than neutral faces. To create the opposite intention to look at unattractive faces, participants searched for a disgusted or sad face because disgusted or sad faces are rated as less attractive than neutral faces. We found longer fixation durations on attractive faces when participants searched for happy faces. When participants searched for disgusted or sad faces, however, fixation durations were longer on unattractive faces. Thus, the search task determined whether attractive faces were looked at longer. The tendency to attend to attractive faces is therefore not automatic but can be overruled by search intentions.

Computational analysis of value learning and value-driven detection of neutral faces by young and older adults

The rapid detection of neutral faces with emotional value plays an important role in social relationships for both young and older adults. Recent psychological studies have indicated that young adults show efficient value learning for neutral faces and the detection of "value-associated faces," while older adults show slightly different patterns of value learning and value-based detection of neutral faces. However, the mechanisms underlying these processes remain unknown. To investigate this, we applied hierarchical reinforcement learning and diffusion models to a value learning task and value-driven detection task that involved neutral faces; the tasks were completed by young and older adults. The results for the learning task suggested that the sensitivity of learning feedback might decrease with age. In the detection task, the younger adults accumulated information more efficiently than the older adults, and the perceptual time leading to motion onset was shorter in the younger adults. In younger adults only, the reward sensitivity during associative learning might enhance the accumulation of information during a visual search for neutral faces in a rewarded task. These results provide insight into the processing linked to efficient detection of faces associated with emotional values, and the age-related changes therein.

Effects of aging on face processing: An ERP study of the own-age bias with neutral and emotional faces

Older adults systematically show an enhanced N170 amplitude during the visualization of facial expressions of emotion. The present study aimed to replicate this finding, further investigating if this effect is specific to facial stimuli, present in other neural correlates of face processing, and modulated by own-age faces. To this purpose, younger (n = 25; M_age = 28.36), middle-aged (n = 23; M_age = 48.74), and older adults (n = 25; M_age = 67.36) performed two face/emotion identification tasks during an EEG recording. The results showed that groups did not differ regarding P100 amplitude, but older adults had increased N170 amplitude for both facial and non-facial stimuli. The event-related potentials analysed were not modulated by an own-age bias, but older faces elicited larger N170 in the Emotion Identification Task for all groups. This increased amplitude may reflect a higher ambiguity of older faces due to age-related changes in their physical features, which may elicit higher neural resources to decode. Regarding P250, older faces elicited decreased amplitudes than younger faces, which may reflect a reduced processing of the emotional content of older faces. This interpretation is consistent with the lower accuracy obtained for this category of stimuli across groups. These results have important social implications and suggest that aging may hamper the neural processing of facial expressions of emotion, especially for own-age peers.

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

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.

The age bias in labeling facial expressions in children: Effects of intensity and expression

Emotion reasoning, including labeling of facial expressions, is an important building block for a child's social development. This study investigated age biases in labeling facial expressions in children and adults, focusing on the influence of intensity and expression on age bias. Children (5 to 14 years old; N = 152) and adults (19 to 25 years old; N = 30) labeled happiness, disgust or sadness at five intensity levels (0%; 25%; 50%; 75%; and 100%) in facial images of children and adults. Sensitivity was computed for each of the expression-intensity combinations, separately for the child and adult faces. Results show that children and adults have an age bias at low levels of intensity (25%). In the case of sadness, children have an age bias for all intensities. Thus, the impact of the age of the face seems largest for expressions which might be most difficult to recognise. Moreover, both adults and children label most expressions best in adult rather than child faces, leading to an other-age bias in children and an own-age bias in adults. Overall, these findings reveal that both children and adults exhibit an age bias in labeling subtle facial expressions of emotions.

Social contacts and loneliness affect the own age bias for emotional faces

Individuals are better at recognizing faces of their own age group (Own Age Bias) but it is unclear whether this bias occurs also for emotional faces and to what extent is affected by loneliness. Young individuals (N = 235) completed an age categorization task on faces of young and old individuals showing neutral, happy, and angry expressions. After a filler task, they categorized as seen or novel the original set of faces intermixed with a new set. Findings showed an Own Age Bias for novel young faces but no evidence that emotion eliminates it. Recognition accuracy was better for emotional faces, but the two factors did not interact. Importantly, low loneliness was linked to an Own Age Bias for novel happy faces. These findings are discussed in the context of current theoretical accounts of the Own Age Bias and of the effects of loneliness on attention and memory.

Age-differences in interpreting the valence of ambiguous facial expressions: evidence for multiple contributing processes

Surprised facial expressions, which are ambiguous in valence, are interpreted more positively by older adults than by younger adults. To evaluate the processes contributing to this age difference, we varied the spatial frequency of the surprised-face stimuli. When faces were presented in a low-spatial-frequency band, it biased participants to rate them negatively. Although this occurred for both younger and older adults, the older adults' ratings of the low-spatial-frequency faces were more positive than that of the younger adults. This suggests that there is an age-related reduction in the default negativity of interpretations. We also found that older adults, as a whole, rated the high-spatial-frequency faces more positively than did younger adults. However, this effect was eliminated for the subset of older adults with poor high-spatial-frequency perception abilities for whom these faces were difficult to perceive. Thus, older adults' more positive interpretations of surprised faces may also reflect cognitively-effortful regulatory processes.

The Effects of Separate Facial Areas on Emotion Recognition in Different Adult Age Groups: A Laboratory and a Naturalistic Study

The identification of facial expressions is critical for social interaction. The ability to recognize facial emotional expressions declines with age. These age effects have been associated with differential age-related looking patterns. The present research project set out to systematically test the role of specific facial areas for emotion recognition across the adult lifespan. Study 1 investigated the impact of displaying only separate facial areas versus the full face on emotion recognition in 62 younger (20-24 years) and 65 middle-aged adults (40-65 years). Study 2 examined if wearing face masks differentially compromises younger (18-33 years, N = 71) versus middle-aged to older adults' (51-83 years, N = 73) ability to identify different emotional expressions. Results of Study 1 suggested no general decrease in emotion recognition across the lifespan; instead, age-related performance seems to depend on the specific emotion and presented face area. Similarly, Study 2 observed only deficits in the identification of angry, fearful, and neutral expressions in older adults, but no age-related differences with regards to happy, sad, and disgusted expressions. Overall, face masks reduced participants' emotion recognition; however, there were no differential age effects. Results are discussed in light of current models of age-related changes in emotion recognition.

Subjective and objective difficulty of emotional facial expression perception from dynamic stimuli

This study aimed to discover predictors of subjective and objective difficulty in emotion perception from dynamic facial expressions. We used a multidimensional emotion perception framework, in which observers rated the perceived emotion along a number of dimensions instead of choosing from traditionally-used discrete categories of emotions. Data were collected online from 441 participants who rated facial expression stimuli in a novel paradigm designed to separately measure subjective (self-reported) and objective (deviation from the population consensus) difficulty. We targeted person-specific (sex and age of observers and actors) and stimulus-specific (valence and arousal values) predictors of those difficulty scores. Our findings suggest that increasing age of actors makes emotion perception more difficult for observers, and that perception difficulty is underestimated by men in comparison to women, and by younger and older adults in comparison to middle-aged adults. The results also yielded an increase in the objective difficulty measure for female observers and female actors. Stimulus-specific factors–valence and arousal–exhibited quadratic relationships with subjective and objective difficulties: Very positive and very negative stimuli were linked to reduced subjective and objective difficulty, whereas stimuli of very low and high arousal were linked to decreased subjective but increased objective difficulty. Exploratory analyses revealed low relevance of person-specific variables for the prediction of difficulty but highlighted the importance of valence in emotion perception, in line with functional accounts of emotions. Our findings highlight the need to complement traditional emotion recognition paradigms with novel designs, like the one presented here, to grasp the “big picture” of human emotion perception.

Individual differences in pupil dilation to others' emotional and neutral eyes with varying pupil sizes

Sensitivity to others' emotional signals is an important factor for social interaction. While many studies of emotional reactivity focus on facial emotional expressions, signals such as pupil dilation which can indicate arousal, may also affect observers. For example, observers' pupils dilate when viewing someone with dilated pupils, so-called pupillary contagion. Yet it is unclear how pupil size and emotional expression interact as signals. Further, examining individual differences in emotional reactivity to others can shed light on its mechanisms and potential outcomes. In the current study, adults' (N = 453) pupil size was assessed while they viewed images of the eye region of individuals varying in emotional expression (neutral, happy, sad, fearful, angry) and pupil size (large, medium, small). Participants showed pupillary contagion regardless of the emotional expression. Individual differences in demographics (gender, age, socioeconomic status) and psychosocial factors (anxiety, depression, sleep problems) were also examined, yet the only factor related to pupillary contagion was socioeconomic status, with higher socioeconomic status predicting less pupillary contagion for emotionally-neutral stimuli. The results suggest that while pupillary contagion is a robust phenomenon, it can vary meaningfully across individuals.

Neural Mechanisms of Perceiving and Subsequently Recollecting Emotional Facial Expressions in Young and Older Adults

It is known that emotional facial expressions modulate the perception and subsequent recollection of faces and that aging alters these modulatory effects. Yet, the underlying neural mechanisms are not well understood, and they were the focus of the current fMRI study. We scanned healthy young and older adults while perceiving happy, neutral, or angry faces paired with names. Participants were then provided with the names of the faces and asked to recall the facial expression of each face. fMRI analyses focused on the fusiform face area (FFA), the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), the OFC, the amygdala, and the hippocampus (HC). Univariate activity, multivariate pattern (MVPA), and functional connectivity analyses were performed. The study yielded two main sets of findings. First, in pSTS and the amygdala, univariate activity and MVPA discrimination during the processing of facial expressions were similar in young and older adults, whereas in FFA and OFC, MVPA discriminated facial expressions less accurately in older than young adults. These findings suggest that facial expression representations in FFA and OFC reflect age-related dedifferentiation and positivity effect. Second, HC-OFC connectivity showed subsequent memory effects (SMEs) for happy expressions in both age groups, HC-FFA connectivity exhibited SMEs for happy and neutral expressions in young adults, and HC-pSTS interactions displayed SMEs for happy expressions in older adults. These results could be related to compensatory mechanisms and positivity effects in older adults. Taken together, the results clarify the effects of aging on the neural mechanisms in perceiving and encoding facial expressions.

Age-of-actor effects in body expression recognition of children

Investigations of developmental trajectories for emotion recognition suggest that both face- and body expression recognition increases rapidly in early childhood and reaches adult levels of performance near the age of ten. So far, little is known about whether children's ability to recognise body expressions is influenced by the age of the person they are observing. This question is investigated here by presenting 119 children and 42 young adults with videos of children, young adults and older adults expressing emotions with their whole body. The results revealed an own-age advantage for children, reflected in adult-level accuracy for videos of children for most expressions but reduced accuracy for videos of older adults. Children's recognition of older adults' expressions was not correlated with children's estimated amount of contact with older adults. Support for potential influences of social biases on performance measures was minimal. The own-age advantage was explained in terms of children's reduced familiarity with body expressions of older adults due to aging related changes in the kinematics characteristics of movements and potentially due to stronger embodiment of other children's bodily movements.

An Exploration of the Own-Age Effect on Facial Emotion Recognition in Normal Elderly People and Individuals with the Preclinical and Demented Alzheimer's Disease

BACKGROUND

The issue of whether there exists an own-effect on facial recognition in the elderly remains equivocal. Moreover, currently the literature of this issue in pathological aging is little.

OBJECTIVE

Our study was thus to explore the issue in both of healthy older people and patients with ADMethods:In study 1, 27 older and 31 younger healthy adults were recruited; in study 2, 27 healthy older adults and 80 patients (including subjective cognitive decline (SCD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and Alzheimer's disease (AD) groups) were recruited. Participants received the Taiwan Facial Emotion Recognition Task (FER Task), and a clinical neuropsychological assessment.

RESULTS

No significant differences on the FER test were found among our groups, except for sadness recognition in which our MCI and AD patients' scores were remarkably lower than their healthy counterparts. The own-age effect was not significantly evident in healthy younger and older adults, except for recognizing neutral photos. Our patients with MCI and AD tended to have the effect, particularly for the sad recognition in which the effect was significantly evident in terms of error features (mislabeling it as anger in younger-face and neutral in older-face photos).

CONCLUSION

Our results displayed no remarkable own-age effect on facial emotional recognition in the healthy elderly (including SCD). However, it did not appear the case for MCI and AD patients, especially their recognizing those sadness items, suggesting that an inclusion of the FER task particularly involving those items of low-intensity emotion in clinical neuropsychological assessment might be contributory to the early detection of AD-related pathological individuals.

Introducing a Face Sort Paradigm to Evaluate Age Differences in Emotion Perception

OBJECTIVES

Previous research has uncovered age-related differences in emotion perception. To date, studies have relied heavily on forced-choice methods that stipulate possible responses. These constrained methods limit discovery of variation in emotion perception, which may be due to subtle differences in underlying concepts for emotion.

METHOD

We employed a face sort paradigm in which young (N = 42) and older adult (N = 43) participants were given 120 photographs portraying six target emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) and were instructed to create and label piles, such that individuals in each pile were feeling the same way.

RESULTS

There were no age differences in number of piles created, nor in how well labels mapped onto the target emotion categories. However, older adults demonstrated lower consistency in sorting, such that fewer photographs in a given pile belonged to the same target emotion category. At the same time, older adults labeled piles using emotion words that were acquired later in development, and thus are considered more semantically complex.

DISCUSSION

These findings partially support the hypothesis that older adults' concepts for emotions and emotional expressions are more complex than those of young adults, demonstrate the utility of incorporating less constrained experimental methods into the investigation of age-related differences in emotion perception, and are consistent with existing evidence of increased cognitive and emotional complexity in adulthood.

Age differences in olfactory affective responses: evidence for a positivity effect and an emotional dedifferentiation

Studies on aging and hedonic judgment of odors have never been addressed within the empirical frameworks of age-related changes in emotion which state that advancing age is associated with a reduced negativity bias and a less pronounced differentiation between hedonic valence and emotional intensity judgments. Our aim was to examine and extend these age-related effects into the field of odors. Thirty-eight younger adults and 40 older adults were asked to evaluate the hedonic valence, emotional intensity, and familiarity of 50 odors controlled for their pleasantness. Compared to younger adults, older adults rated unpleasant odorants as less unpleasant and showed an increased relationship between hedonic valence and emotional intensity ratings. This yields evidence of reduced negativity bias and emotional dedifferentiation in response to odors. Such data suggest that when faced with odors, older people exhibit a reduction of emotional dimensionality leading them to distort emotional processing in a less negative direction.

Face masks reduce emotion-recognition accuracy and perceived closeness

Face masks became the symbol of the global fight against the coronavirus. While face masks' medical benefits are clear, little is known about their psychological consequences. Drawing on theories of the social functions of emotions and rapid trait impressions, we tested hypotheses on face masks' effects on emotion-recognition accuracy and social judgments (perceived trustworthiness, likability, and closeness). Our preregistered study with 191 German adults revealed that face masks diminish people's ability to accurately categorize an emotion expression and make target persons appear less close. Exploratory analyses further revealed that face masks buffered the negative effect of negative (vs. non-negative) emotion expressions on perceptions of trustworthiness, likability, and closeness. Associating face masks with the coronavirus' dangers predicted higher perceptions of closeness for masked but not for unmasked faces. By highlighting face masks' effects on social functioning, our findings inform policymaking and point at contexts where alternatives to face masks are needed.

"Finding an Emotional Face" Revisited: Differences in Own-Age Bias and the Happiness Superiority Effect in Children and Young Adults

People seem to differ in their visual search performance involving emotionally expressive faces when these expressions are seen on faces of others close to their age (peers) compared to faces of non-peers, known as the own-age bias (OAB). This study sought to compare search advantages in angry and happy faces detected on faces of adults and children on a pool of children (N = 77, mean age = 5.57) and adults (N = 68, mean age = 21.48). The goals of this study were to (1) examine the developmental trajectory of expression recognition and (2) examine the development of an OAB. Participants were asked to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Results showed that children and adults found happy faces significantly faster than angry and fearful faces regardless of it being present on the faces of peers or non-peers. Adults responded faster to the faces of peers regardless of the expression. Furthermore, while children detected angry faces significantly faster compared to fearful ones, we found no such difference in adults. In contrast, adults detected all expressions significantly faster when they appeared on the faces of other adults compared to the faces of children. In sum, we found evidence for development in detecting facial expressions and also an age-dependent increase in OAB. We suggest that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations and its overall higher frequency compared to other emotional expressions. Although we only found some evidence on the OAB, using peer or non-peer faces should be a theoretical consideration of future research because the same emotion displayed on non-peers' compared to peers' faces may have different implications and meanings to the perceiver.

An Eye Tracking Investigation of Pain Decoding Based on Older and Younger Adults' Facial Expressions

Nonverbal pain cues such as facial expressions, are useful in the systematic assessment of pain in people with dementia who have severe limitations in their ability to communicate. Nonetheless, the extent to which observers rely on specific pain-related facial responses (e.g., eye movements, frowning) when judging pain remains unclear. Observers viewed three types of videos of patients expressing pain (younger patients, older patients without dementia, older patients with dementia) while wearing an eye tracker device that recorded their viewing behaviors. They provided pain ratings for each patient in the videos. These observers assigned higher pain ratings to older adults compared to younger adults and the highest pain ratings to patients with dementia. Pain ratings assigned to younger adults showed greater correspondence to objectively coded facial reactions compared to older adults. The correspondence of observer ratings was not affected by the cognitive status of target patients as there were no differences between the ratings assigned to older adults with and without dementia. Observers' percentage of total dwell time (amount of time that an observer glances or fixates within a defined visual area of interest) across specific facial areas did not predict the correspondence of observers' pain ratings to objective coding of facial responses. Our results demonstrate that patient characteristics such as age and cognitive status impact the pain decoding process by observers when viewing facial expressions of pain in others.

Are facial emotion recognition tasks adequate for assessing social cognition in older people? A review of the literature

OBJECTIVE

Facial emotion recognition (FER) is a component of social cognition and important to interpersonal relations. Therefore, tasks have been developed to assess this skill in different population. Regarding older people, even healthy individuals have a poorer performance compared to rate of correct answers commonly used to assess such tasks. Perform a systematic review to analyze studies addressing the performance of healthy older adults on FER tasks compared to the 70% correct response rate commonly used for the creation of stimulus banks.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

Searches were conducted up to May 2019 in the Pubmed, PsycInfo, Web of Science, and Scopus databases using the keywords ("faces" OR "facial") AND ("recognition" OR "expression" OR "emotional") AND ("elderly" OR "older adults").

RESULTS

Twenty-seven articles were included in the present review. In 16 studies (59.2%), older people had correct response rates on FER lower than 70% on at least one of the emotions evaluated. Among the studies that evaluated each emotion specifically, 62.5% found correct response rates lower than 70% for the emotion fear, 50% for surprise, 50% for sadness, 37.5% for anger, 21.4% for disgust, and 5.9% for happiness. Moreover, the studies that evaluated the level of intensity of the emotions demonstrated a lower rate of correct responses when the intensity of the facial expression was low.

CONCLUSION

That studies employ methods and facial stimuli that may not be adequate for measuring this skill in older people. Thus, it is important to create adequate tasks for assessing the skill in this population.

Empathic Accuracy: Worse Recognition by Older Adults and Less Transparency in Older Adult Expressions Compared With Young Adults

OBJECTIVES

We examined empathic accuracy, comparing young versus older perceivers, and young versus older emoters. Empathic accuracy is related to but distinct from emotion recognition because perceiver judgments of emotion are based, not on what an emoter looks to be feeling, but on what an emoter says s/he is actually feeling.

METHOD

Young (≤30 years) and older (≥60 years) adults ("emoters") were unobtrusively videotaped while watching movie clips designed to elicit specific emotional states. The emoter videos were then presented to young and older "perceivers," who were instructed to infer what the emoters were feeling.

RESULTS

As predicted, older perceivers' empathic accuracy was less accurate relative to young perceivers. In addition, the emotions of young emoters were considerably easier to read than those of older emoters. There was also some evidence of an own-age advantage in emotion recognition in that older adults had particular difficulty assessing emotion in young faces.

DISCUSSION

These findings have important implications for real-world social adjustment, with older adults experiencing a combination of less emotional transparency and worse understanding of emotional experience.

Evidence of an Own-Age Bias in Facial Emotion Recognition for Adolescents With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

A common interpretation of the face-processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they arise from a failure to develop normative levels of perceptual expertise. One indicator of perceptual expertise for faces is the own-age bias, operationalized as a processing advantage for faces of one's own age, presumably due to more frequent contact and experience. This effect is especially evident in domains of face recognition memory but less commonly investigated in social-emotional expertise (e.g., facial emotion recognition; FER), where individuals with ASD have shown consistent deficits. In the present study, we investigated whether a FER task would elicit an own-age bias for individuals with and without ASD and explored how the magnitude of an own-age bias may differ as a function of ASD status and symptoms. Ninety-two adolescents (63 male) between the ages of 11 and 14 years completed the child- and adult-face subtests of a standardized FER task. Overall FER accuracy was found to differ by ASD severity, reflecting poorer performance for those with increased symptoms. Results also indicated that an own-age bias was evident, reflecting greater FER performance for child compared to adult faces, for all adolescents regardless of ASD status or symptoms. However, the strength of the observed own-age bias did not differ by ASD status or severity. Findings suggest that face processing abilities of adolescents with ASD may be influenced by experience with specific categories of stimuli, similar to their typically developing peers.

Amygdala functional network during recognition of own-age vs. other-age faces in younger and older adults

Facial cues, such as a person's age, provide important information for social interactions. Processing such facial cues can be affected by observer bias. However, there is currently no consensus regarding how the brain is processing facial cues related to age, and if facial age processing changes as a function of the age of the observer (i.e., own-age bias). The primary study aim was to investigate functional networks involved in processing own-age vs. other-age faces among younger and older adults and determine how emotional expression of the face modulates own-age vs. other-age face processing. The secondary study aim was to examine the relation between higher social cognitive processes (i.e., empathy) and modulation of brain activity by facial age and emotional expression. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) younger and older participants were asked to recognize happy, angry, and neutral expressions in own-age and other-age faces. Functional connectivity analyses with the amygdala as seed showed that for own-age faces both age groups recruited a network of regions including the anterior cingulate and anterior insula that was involved in empathy and detection of salient information. Brain-behavior analyses furthermore showed that empathic responses in younger, but not in older, participants were positively correlated with engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of angry own-age faces. These findings identify the neurobehavioral correlates of facial age processing, and its modulation by emotion expression, and directly link facial cue processing to higher-order social cognitive functioning.

The same with age: Evidence for age-related similarities in interpersonal accuracy

Interpersonal accuracy refers to the ability to make accurate perceptions about others' social and emotional qualities. Despite this broad definition, the measurement of interpersonal accuracy remains narrow, as most studies focus on the accurate perception of others' emotional states. Moreover, previous research has relied primarily upon traditional tasks consisting of posed, prototypic expressions and behaviors as stimuli. These methodological limitations may constrain our understanding of how different interpersonal perception skills change in adulthood. The present study investigated the extent to which various interpersonal perception skills are worse, better, or remain the same with age using both traditional and nontraditional interpersonal accuracy tasks. One hundred fifty-one adults from 3 age groups (young, middle age, and older) completed a battery of interpersonal accuracy tasks that assessed eight different emotion perception skills and six different social perception skills. Analyses revealed age-related differences in accuracy for five interpersonal perception skills; differences were typically observed between younger and older adults on emotion perception accuracy and between younger and middle-age adults on social perception accuracy. In contrast, almost all remaining interpersonal perception skills-both emotional and social-revealed greater evidence for age-related similarities than differences in Bayesian analyses. Additional exploratory analyses indicated that the observed age differences in interpersonal accuracy may be attributable to individual differences in cognitive ability rather than age. Results provide a nuanced picture of how interpersonal perception skills change in adulthood and provide new methodological tools for a more complete and comprehensive assessment of interpersonal accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

East Asian Young and Older Adult Perceptions of Emotional Faces From an Age- and Sex-Fair East Asian Facial Expression Database

There is increasing interest in clarifying how different face emotion expressions are perceived by people from different cultures, of different ages and sex. However, scant availability of well-controlled emotional face stimuli from non-Western populations limit the evaluation of cultural differences in face emotion perception and how this might be modulated by age and sex differences. We present a database of East Asian face expression stimuli, enacted by young and older, male and female, Taiwanese using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Combined with a prior database, this present database consists of 90 identities with happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised and neutral expressions amounting to 628 photographs. Twenty young and 24 older East Asian raters scored the photographs for intensities of multiple-dimensions of emotions and induced affect. Multivariate analyses characterized the dimensionality of perceived emotions and quantified effects of age and sex. We also applied commercial software to extract computer-based metrics of emotions in photographs. Taiwanese raters perceived happy faces as one category, sad, angry, and disgusted expressions as one category, and fearful and surprised expressions as one category. Younger females were more sensitive to face emotions than younger males. Whereas, older males showed reduced face emotion sensitivity, older female sensitivity was similar or accentuated relative to young females. Commercial software dissociated six emotions according to the FACS demonstrating that defining visual features were present. Our findings show that East Asians perceive a different dimensionality of emotions than Western-based definitions in face recognition software, regardless of age and sex. Critically, stimuli with detailed cultural norms are indispensable in interpreting neural and behavioral responses involving human facial expression processing. To this end, we add to the tools, which are available upon request, for conducting such research.

Predicting real-world behaviour: Cognition-emotion links across adulthood and everyday functioning at work

Inspired by the discovery of positive age trends in emotional well-being across adulthood, lifespan researchers have uncovered fascinating age differences in cognition-emotion interactions in healthy adult samples, for example in emotion processing, memory, reactivity, perception, and regulation. Taking stock of this body of research, I identify four trends and five remaining gaps in our understanding of emotional functioning in adulthood. In particular, I suggest that the field should pay stronger attention to the prediction of real-world behaviour. Using the sample case of work functioning, I outline gaps in current knowledge, including the lack of data on middle-aged adults, the neglect of relevant cognitive-emotional mechanisms, and the unclear role of life experience. Filling these gaps will enable progress in research on emotional aging in and beyond the work setting and enhance its practical utility for individuals, organisations, and society.

Adolescent Basic Facial Emotion Recognition Is Not Influenced by Puberty or Own-Age Bias

Basic facial emotion recognition is suggested to be negatively affected by puberty onset reflected in a “pubertal dip” in performance compared to pre- or post-puberty. However, findings remain inconclusive. Further, research points to an own-age bias, i.e., a superior emotion recognition for peer faces. We explored adolescents’ ability to recognize specific emotions. Ninety-five children and adolescents, aged 8–17 years, judged whether the emotions displayed by adolescent or adult faces were angry, sad, neutral, or happy. We assessed participants a priori by pubertal status while controlling for age. Results indicated no “pubertal dip”, but decreasing reaction times across adolescence. No own-age bias was found. Taken together, basic facial emotion recognition does not seem to be disrupted during puberty as compared to pre- and post-puberty.

An Adult Developmental Approach to Perceived Facial Attractiveness and Distinctiveness

Attractiveness and distinctiveness constitute facial features with high biological and social relevance. Bringing a developmental perspective to research on social-cognitive face perception, we used a large set of faces taken from the FACES Lifespan Database to examine effects of face and perceiver characteristics on subjective evaluations of attractiveness and distinctiveness in young (20-31 years), middle-aged (44-55 years), and older (70-81 years) men and women. We report novel findings supporting variations by face and perceiver age, in interaction with gender and emotion: although older and middle-aged compared to young perceivers generally rated faces of all ages as more attractive, young perceivers gave relatively higher attractiveness ratings to young compared to middle-aged and older faces. Controlling for variations in attractiveness, older compared to young faces were viewed as more distinctive by young and middle-aged perceivers. Age affected attractiveness more negatively for female than male faces. Furthermore, happy faces were rated as most attractive, while disgusted faces were rated as least attractive, particularly so by middle-aged and older perceivers and for young and female faces. Perceivers largely agreed on distinctiveness ratings for neutral and happy emotions, but older and middle-aged compared to young perceivers rated faces displaying negative emotions as more distinctive. These findings underscore the importance of a lifespan perspective on perception of facial characteristics and suggest possible effects of age on goal-directed perception, social motivation, and in-group bias. This publication makes available picture-specific normative data for experimental stimulus selection.

Emotion identification across adulthood using the Dynamic FACES database of emotional expressions in younger, middle aged, and older adults

Facial stimuli are widely used in behavioural and brain science research to investigate emotional facial processing. However, some studies have demonstrated that dynamic expressions elicit stronger emotional responses compared to static images. To address the need for more ecologically valid and powerful facial emotional stimuli, we created Dynamic FACES, a database of morphed videos (n = 1026) from younger, middle-aged, and older adults displaying naturalistic emotional facial expressions (neutrality, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, happiness). To assess adult age differences in emotion identification of dynamic stimuli and to provide normative ratings for this modified set of stimuli, healthy adults (n = 1822, age range 18-86 years) categorised for each video the emotional expression displayed, rated the expression distinctiveness, estimated the age of the face model, and rated the naturalness of the expression. We found few age differences in emotion identification when using dynamic stimuli. Only for angry faces did older adults show lower levels of identification accuracy than younger adults. Further, older adults outperformed middle-aged adults' in identification of sadness. The use of dynamic facial emotional stimuli has previously been limited, but Dynamic FACES provides a large database of high-resolution naturalistic, dynamic expressions across adulthood. Information on using Dynamic FACES for research purposes can be found at http://faces.mpib-berlin.mpg.de .

Effects of induced sad mood on facial emotion perception in young and older adults

Older adults perceive less intense negative emotion in facial expressions compared to younger counterparts. Prior research has also demonstrated that mood alters facial emotion perception. Nevertheless, there is little evidence which evaluates the interactive effects of age and mood on emotion perception. This study investigated the effects of sad mood on younger and older adults' perception of emotional and neutral faces. Participants rated the intensity of stimuli while listening to sad music and in silence. Measures of mood were administered. Younger and older participants' rated sad faces as displaying stronger sadness when they experienced sad mood. While younger participants showed no influence of sad mood on happiness ratings of happy faces, older adults rated happy faces as conveying less happiness when they experienced sad mood. This study demonstrates how emotion perception can change when a controlled mood induction procedure is applied to alter mood in young and older participants.

Older adults' neural activation in the reward circuit is sensitive to face trustworthiness

We examined older adult (OA) and younger adult (YA) neural sensitivity to face trustworthiness in reward circuit regions, previously found to respond to trustworthiness in YA. Interactions of face trustworthiness with age revealed effects exclusive to OA in the amygdala and caudate, and an effect that was not moderated by age in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). OA, but not YA, showed a nonlinear amygdala response to face trustworthiness, with significantly stronger activation response to high than to medium trustworthy faces, and no difference between low and medium or high. This may explain why an earlier study investigating OA amygdala activation to trustworthiness failed to find a significant effect, since only the linear low versus high trustworthiness difference was assessed. OA, but not YA, also showed significantly stronger activation to high than to low trustworthy faces in the right caudate, indicating a positive linear effect, consistent with previous YA research, as well as significantly stronger activation to high than to medium but not low trustworthy faces in the left caudate, indicating a nonlinear effect. Activation in dACC across both age groups showed a positive linear effect consistent with previous YA research. Finally, OA rated the faces as more trustworthy than did YA across all levels of trustworthiness. Future research should examine whether the null effects for YA were due to our inclusion of older faces. Research also should investigate possible implications of our findings for more ecologically valid OA responses to people who vary in facial trustworthiness.

Hearing, Emotion, Amplification, Research, and Training Workshop: Current Understanding of Hearing Loss and Emotion Perception and Priorities for Future Research

The question of how hearing loss and hearing rehabilitation affect patients' momentary emotional experiences is one that has received little attention but has considerable potential to affect patients' psychosocial function. This article is a product from the Hearing, Emotion, Amplification, Research, and Training workshop, which was convened to develop a consensus document describing research on emotion perception relevant for hearing research. This article outlines conceptual frameworks for the investigation of emotion in hearing research; available subjective, objective, neurophysiologic, and peripheral physiologic data acquisition research methods; the effects of age and hearing loss on emotion perception; potential rehabilitation strategies; priorities for future research; and implications for clinical audiologic rehabilitation. More broadly, this article aims to increase awareness about emotion perception research in audiology and to stimulate additional research on the topic.

The Older Adult Positivity Effect in Evaluations of Trustworthiness: Emotion Regulation or Cognitive Capacity?

An older adult positivity effect, i.e., the tendency for older adults to favor positive over negative stimulus information more than do younger adults, has been previously shown in attention, memory, and evaluations. This effect has been attributed to greater emotion regulation in older adults. In the case of attention and memory, this explanation has been supported by some evidence that the older adult positivity effect is most pronounced for negative stimuli, which would motivate emotion regulation, and that it is reduced by cognitive load, which would impede emotion regulation. We investigated whether greater older adult positivity in the case of evaluative responses to faces is also enhanced for negative stimuli and attenuated by cognitive load, as an emotion regulation explanation would predict. In two studies, younger and older adults rated trustworthiness of faces that varied in valence both under low and high cognitive load, with the latter manipulated by a distracting backwards counting task. In Study 1, face valence was manipulated by attractiveness (low /disfigured faces, medium, high/fashion models' faces). In Study 2, face valence was manipulated by trustworthiness (low, medium, high). Both studies revealed a significant older adult positivity effect. However, contrary to an emotion regulation account, this effect was not stronger for more negative faces, and cognitive load increased rather than decreased the rated trustworthiness of negatively valenced faces. Although inconsistent with emotion regulation, the latter effect is consistent with theory and research arguing that more cognitive resources are required to process negative stimuli, because they are more cognitively elaborated than positive ones. The finding that increased age and increased cognitive load both enhanced the positivity of trustworthy ratings suggests that the older adult positivity effect in evaluative ratings of faces may reflect age-related declines in cognitive capacity rather than increases in the regulation of negative emotions.

Age-congruency and contact effects in body expression recognition from point-light displays (PLD)

Recognition of older people’s body expressions is a crucial social skill. We here investigate how age, not just of the observer, but also of the observed individual, affects this skill. Age may influence the ability to recognize other people’s body expressions by changes in one’s own ability to perform certain action over the life-span (i.e., an own-age bias may occur, with best recognition for one’s own age). Whole body point light displays of children, young adults and older adults (>70 years) expressing six different emotions were presented to observers of the same three age-groups. Across two variations of the paradigm, no evidence for the predicted own-age bias (a cross-over interaction between one’s own age and the observed person’s age) was found. Instead, experience effects were found with children better recognizing older actors’ expressions of ‘active emotions,’ such as anger and happiness with greater exposure in daily life. Together, the findings suggest that age-related changes in one own’s mobility only influences body expression categorization in young children who interact frequently with older adults.

Impaired socio-emotional processing in a developmental music disorder

Some individuals show a congenital deficit for music processing despite normal peripheral auditory processing, cognitive functioning, and music exposure. This condition, termed congenital amusia, is typically approached regarding its profile of musical and pitch difficulties. Here, we examine whether amusia also affects socio-emotional processing, probing auditory and visual domains. Thirteen adults with amusia and 11 controls completed two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants judged emotions in emotional speech prosody, nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., crying), and (silent) facial expressions. Target emotions were: amusement, anger, disgust, fear, pleasure, relief, and sadness. Compared to controls, amusics were impaired for all stimulus types, and the magnitude of their impairment was similar for auditory and visual emotions. In Experiment 2, participants listened to spontaneous and posed laughs, and either inferred the authenticity of the speaker's state, or judged how much laughs were contagious. Amusics showed decreased sensitivity to laughter authenticity, but normal contagion responses. Across the experiments, mixed-effects models revealed that the acoustic features of vocal signals predicted socio-emotional evaluations in both groups, but the profile of predictive acoustic features was different in amusia. These findings suggest that a developmental music disorder can affect socio-emotional cognition in subtle ways, an impairment not restricted to auditory information.

Caring more and knowing more reduces age-related differences in emotion perception

Traditional emotion perception tasks show that older adults are less accurate than are young adults at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Recently, we proposed that socioemotional factors might explain why older adults seem impaired in lab tasks but less so in everyday life (Isaacowitz & Stanley, 2011). Thus, in the present research we empirically tested whether socioemotional factors such as motivation and familiarity can alter this pattern of age effects. In 1 task, accountability instructions eliminated age differences in the traditional emotion perception task. Using a novel emotion perception paradigm featuring spontaneous dynamic facial expressions of a familiar romantic partner versus a same-age stranger, we found that age differences in emotion perception accuracy were attenuated in the familiar partner condition, relative to the stranger condition. Taken together, the results suggest that both overall accuracy as well as specific patterns of age effects differ appreciably between traditional emotion perception tasks and emotion perception within a socioemotional context.

Age-Related Response Bias in the Decoding of Sad Facial Expressions

Recent studies have found that age is negatively associated with the accuracy of decoding emotional facial expressions; this effect of age was found for actors as well as for raters. Given that motivational differences and stereotypes may bias the attribution of emotion, the aim of the present study was to explore whether these age effects are due to response bias, that is, the unbalanced use of response categories. Thirty younger raters (19-30 years) and thirty older raters (65-81 years) viewed video clips of younger and older actors representing the same age ranges, and decoded their facial expressions. We computed both raw hit rates and bias-corrected hit rates to assess the influence of potential age-related response bias on decoding accuracy. Whereas raw hit rates indicated significant effects of both the actors' and the raters' ages on decoding accuracy for sadness, these age effects were no longer significant when response bias was corrected. Our results suggest that age effects on the accuracy of decoding facial expressions may be due, at least in part, to age-related response bias.

Emotional expressions of old faces are perceived as more positive and less negative than young faces in young adults

Interpreting the emotions of others through their facial expressions can provide important social information, yet the way in which we judge an emotion is subject to psychosocial factors. We hypothesized that the age of a face would bias how the emotional expressions are judged, with older faces generally more likely to be viewed as having more positive and less negative expressions than younger faces. Using two-alternative forced-choice perceptual decision tasks, participants sorted young and old faces of which emotional expressions were gradually morphed into one of two categories-"neutral vs. happy" and "neutral vs. angry." The results indicated that old faces were more frequently perceived as having a happy expression at the lower emotional intensity levels, and less frequently perceived as having an angry expression at the higher emotional intensity levels than younger faces in young adults. Critically, the perceptual decision threshold at which old faces were judged as happy was lower than for young faces, and higher for angry old faces compared to young faces. These findings suggest that the age of the face influences how its emotional expression is interpreted in social interactions.

No Own-Age Advantage in Children's Recognition of Emotion on Prototypical Faces of Different Ages

We test whether there is an own-age advantage in emotion recognition using prototypical younger child, older child and adult faces displaying emotional expressions. Prototypes were created by averaging photographs of individuals from 6 different age and sex categories (male 5-8 years, male 9-12 years, female 5-8 years, female 9-12 years, adult male and adult female), each posing 6 basic emotional expressions. In the study 5-8 year old children (n = 33), 9-13 year old children (n = 70) and adults (n = 92) labelled these expression prototypes in a 6-alternative forced-choice task. There was no evidence that children or adults recognised expressions better on faces from their own age group. Instead, child facial expression prototypes were recognised as accurately as adult expression prototypes by all age groups. This suggests there is no substantial own-age advantage in children's emotion recognition.

Effect of Acting Experience on Emotion Expression and Recognition in Voice: Non-Actors Provide Better Stimuli than Expected

Both in the performative arts and in emotion research, professional actors are assumed to be capable of delivering emotions comparable to spontaneous emotional expressions. This study examines the effects of acting training on vocal emotion depiction and recognition. We predicted that professional actors express emotions in a more realistic fashion than non-professional actors. However, professional acting training may lead to a particular speech pattern; this might account for vocal expressions by actors that are less comparable to authentic samples than the ones by non-professional actors. We compared 80 emotional speech tokens from radio interviews with 80 re-enactments by professional and inexperienced actors, respectively. We analyzed recognition accuracies for emotion and authenticity ratings and compared the acoustic structure of the speech tokens. Both play-acted conditions yielded similar recognition accuracies and possessed more variable pitch contours than the spontaneous recordings. However, professional actors exhibited signs of different articulation patterns compared to non-trained speakers. Our results indicate that for emotion research, emotional expressions by professional actors are not better suited than those from non-actors.

When age matters: differences in facial mimicry and autonomic responses to peers' emotions in teenagers and adults

Age-group membership effects on explicit emotional facial expressions recognition have been widely demonstrated. In this study we investigated whether Age-group membership could also affect implicit physiological responses, as facial mimicry and autonomic regulation, to observation of emotional facial expressions. To this aim, facial Electromyography (EMG) and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) were recorded from teenager and adult participants during the observation of facial expressions performed by teenager and adult models. Results highlighted that teenagers exhibited greater facial EMG responses to peers' facial expressions, whereas adults showed higher RSA-responses to adult facial expressions. The different physiological modalities through which young and adults respond to peers' emotional expressions are likely to reflect two different ways to engage in social interactions with coetaneous. Findings confirmed that age is an important and powerful social feature that modulates interpersonal interactions by influencing low-level physiological responses.