The effects of aging on recognition of basic emotions in different modalities.
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1
University of Auckland, School of Psychology, New Zealand
i.Background: Research shows that healthy aging is associated with affective changes, most often indicating a decline in older adults’ abilities to recognize basic emotions across modalities. Contrasting findings, however, have elicited support for the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, which suggests that as individuals get older, they show a preference for positive emotions and show better recognition of positive stimuli. Our study aimed to test this hypothesis and further clarify age-related changes in affective recognition.
ii.Methods: A total of 60 participants were recruited for the study (38 younger and 22 older adults). The ability to recognize basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise and sadness) was assessed in visual (Recognition of Affective Facial Expressions) and aural (Affective Prosody) modalities. State levels of anxiety, depression and irritability were also assessed. Both of the affective recognition included subtle and strong conditions, with stimuli presented in a forced-choice labeling format, which included the basic emotions and a neutral label.
iii.Results: Older adults (OA) showed similar levels of state mood levels as our younger sample. They were equally able to recognize basic emotions from facial expressions, with the exception of superior recognition of disgusted facial expressions by OA compared to the younger group. On the emotional prosody task, the OA showed a significantly poorer performance compared to younger adults, although this was most visible in the subtle condition. The only difference between the groups on recognition of strong spoken emotions related to reduced recognition of sadness in OA.
iv.Discussion: These results do not indicate a decline in affective recognition in the visual task and, in fact, suggest an age-related superiority on recognition of disgust. The findings suggest that in healthy aging proficiency of affective recognition may vary across modalities and, furthermore, that decline in these abilities is not an inevitable part of aging and may be subject to modulation through other factors. Secondly, our results do not support the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory as our older adults did not show greater accuracy on positive emotion recognition in either of the two affective tasks; they also did not show lower levels of anxiety, depression or irritability than younger adults.
Keywords:
Aging,
Basic emotions,
Prosody,
emotional faces,
emotion recognition
Conference:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, 28 Nov - 1 Dec, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Emotion and Social
Citation:
Samorow
NP and
Tippett
LJ
(2013). The effects of aging on recognition of basic emotions in different modalities..
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2013 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.212.00045
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Received:
15 Oct 2013;
Published Online:
25 Nov 2013.
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Correspondence:
Miss. Natalia P Samorow, University of Auckland, School of Psychology, Auckland, New Zealand, natalia.samorow@gmail.com