Cognitive consequences of expressive regulation in older adults.

Previous research has suggested that older and young adults are equally able to regulate their outward expressions of emotion and that the regulation of emotional expression in younger adults results in decreased memory for the emotional stimulus. In the current study, we examined whether older adults show this same memory effect. Older and young adults viewed positive and negative emotional pictures under instructions to view the pictures naturally, enhance their facial expressions, or suppress their facial expressions. Older and young adults showed equivalent outward regulation of expression, but suppressing their emotional expressions led to reduced memory for emotional stimuli only in the young adults. The results suggest that older and young adults are achieving control of their expressions through different mechanisms or strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in recognition of emotion in lexical stimuli and facial expressions.

Age differences in emotion recognition from lexical stimuli and facial expressions were examined in a cross-sectional sample of adults aged 18 to 85 (N = 357). Emotion-specific response biases differed by age: Older adults were disproportionately more likely to incorrectly label lexical stimuli as happiness, sadness, and surprise and to incorrectly label facial stimuli as disgust and fear. After these biases were controlled, findings suggested that older adults were less accurate at identifying emotions than were young adults, but the pattern differed across emotions and task types. The lexical task showed stronger age differences than the facial task, and for lexical stimuli, age groups differed in accuracy for all emotional states except fear. For facial stimuli, in contrast, age groups differed only in accuracy for anger, disgust, fear, and happiness. Implications for age-related changes in different types of emotional processing are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Older Adults as Adaptive Decision Makers: Evidence From the Iowa Gambling Task.

Older adults process emotional information differently than younger adults and may demonstrate less of a negativity bias on cognitive tasks. The Iowa Gambling Task designed by A. Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel, and A. R. Damasio (1997) has been used to examine the integration of emotion and cognition in a risky-choice decision task and may give insight into differences in the decision-making strategies in younger and older adults. Eighty-eight younger adults (18-34 years) and 67 older adults (65-88 years) completed the Iowa Gambling Task. Using a theoretical decomposition of the task designed by J. R. Busemeyer and J. C. Stout (2002), the authors found that both groups were successful at solving the task but used very different strategies that reflected each group's strength. For younger adults, that strength was learning and memory. For older adults, that strength was an accurate representation of wins and losses (valence). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in the integration of gaze direction and facial expressions of emotion.

Gaze direction influences younger adults' perception of emotional expressions, with direct gaze enhancing the perception of anger and joy, while averted gaze enhances the perception of fear. Age-related declines in emotion recognition and eye-gaze processing have been reported, indicating that there may be age-related changes in the ability to integrate these facial cues. As there is evidence of a positivity bias with age, age-related difficulties integrating these cues may be greatest for negative emotions. The present research investigated age differences in the extent to which gaze direction influenced explicit perception (e.g., anger, fear and joy; Study 1) and social judgments (e.g., of approachability; Study 2) of emotion faces. Gaze direction did not influence the perception of fear in either age group. In both studies, age differences were found in the extent to which gaze direction influenced judgments of angry and joyful faces, with older adults showing less integration of gaze and emotion cues than younger adults. Age differences were greatest when interpreting angry expressions. Implications of these findings for older adults' social functioning are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of age on cross-modal emotion perception.

Efficient navigation of our social world depends on the generation, interpretation, and combination of social signals within different sensory systems. However, the influence of healthy adult aging on multisensory integration of emotional stimuli remains poorly explored. This article comprises 2 studies that directly address issues of age differences on cross-modal emotional matching and explicit identification. The first study compared 25 younger adults (19–40 years) and 25 older adults (60–80 years) on their ability to match cross-modal congruent and incongruent emotional stimuli. The second study looked at performance of 20 younger (19–40) and 20 older adults (60–80) on explicit emotion identification when information was presented congruently in faces and voices or only in faces or in voices. In Study 1, older adults performed as well as younger adults on tasks in which congruent auditory and visual emotional information were presented concurrently, but there were age-related differences in matching incongruent cross-modal information. Results from Study 2 indicated that though older adults were impaired at identifying emotions from 1 modality (faces or voices alone), they benefited from congruent multisensory information as age differences were eliminated. The findings are discussed in relation to social, emotional, and cognitive changes with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion perception in Alzheimer’s disease and mood disorder in old age.

Difficulties in understanding emotional signals might have important implications for social interactions in old age. In this study we investigated emotion perception skills involved in decoding facial expressions of emotion in healthy older adults, compared with those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or late-life mood disorder (MD). Although those with MD were mildly impaired in identifying emotional expressions, this was not caused by negative biases in choosing labels. Emotion decoding performance in AD was much more impaired, particularly when relatively subtle expressions were presented. Difficulties in choosing between labels to describe an emotional face were predicted by executive dysfunction, whereas impaired ability to match 2 emotional faces was related to general difficulties with face perception. Across all 3 groups, problems with emotion perception predicted quality of life independently of variance predicted by cognitive function and mood, indicating the potential importance of emotion decoding skills in the well-being of older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging minds and twisting attitudes: An fMRI investigation of age differences in inhibiting prejudice.

Cognitive capacity is believed to decline with age, but it is not known whether this decline extends to tasks involving social cognition. In the current study, social neuroscience methodologies were used to examine the effects of age-related cognitive decline on older adults’ abilities to engage regulatory mechanisms (which are typically impaired by normal aging) to inhibit negative reactions to stigmatized individuals. Older and young adults were presented with images of stigmatized individuals (e.g., individuals with amputations, substance abusers) and of normal controls while they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. All participants were also given a battery of tests to assess their executive function capacity. Young adults showed more activity in areas associated with empathy (i.e., medial prefrontal cortex) than did older adults when viewing stigmatized faces. By contrast, older adults with relatively preserved levels of executive function had heightened activity in areas previously implicated in emotion regulation (i.e., lateral prefrontal cortex) as compared to other groups. These results suggest that although cognitive decline may interfere with older adults’ attitudes toward stigmatized individuals, older adults with relatively preserved cognitive function may utilize different strategies to compensate for these deficits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anger management: Age differences in emotional modulation of visual processing.

Although positive and negative images enhance the visual processing of young adults, recent work suggests that a life-span shift in emotion processing goals may lead older adults to avoid negative images. To examine this tendency for older adults to regulate their intake of negative emotional information, the current study investigated age-related differences in the perceptual boost received by probes appearing over facial expressions of emotion. Visually-evoked event-related potentials were recorded from the scalp over cortical regions associated with visual processing as a probe appeared over facial expressions depicting anger, sadness, happiness, or no emotion. The activity of the visual system in response to each probe was operationalized in terms of the P1 component of the event-related potentials evoked by the probe. For young adults, the visual system was more active (i.e., greater P1 amplitude) when the probes appeared over any of the emotional facial expressions. However, for older adults, the visual system displayed reduced activity when the probe appeared over angry facial expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Goal-directed memory: The role of cognitive control in older adults' emotional memory.

The present study revealed that older adults recruit cognitive control processes to strengthen positive and diminish negative information in memory. In Experiment 1, older adults engaged in more elaborative processing when retrieving positive memories than they did when retrieving negative memories. In Experiment 2, older adults who did well on tasks involving cognitive control were more likely than those doing poorly to favor positive pictures in memory. In Experiment 3, older adults who were distracted during memory encoding no longer favored positive over negative pictures in their later recall, revealing that older adults use cognitive resources to implement emotional goals during encoding. In contrast, younger adults showed no signs of using cognitive control to make their memories more positive, indicating that, for them, emotion regulation goals are not chronically activated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in anxious responding: Older and calmer, unless the trigger is physical.

The current study examines how the aging relevance of anxiety triggers, particularly those tied to physical threat, influences the expression of anxiety in older and younger adults. It was expected that older adults would exhibit less anxiety than younger adults in response to nonphysical triggers but that this age-related difference would diminish when faced with physical triggers. Anxiety responses were measured in older (N = 49, ages 60–85) and younger (N = 49, ages 17–34) adults in response to (a) physical and social anxiety provocations, and (b) a threat interpretation measure. Consistent with hypotheses, results for the anxiety provocations indicated less anxiety among older (vs. younger) adults on a range of anxiety measures (affective, cognitive, physiological) when triggers did not concern physical health, but this age difference diminished when physical health was threatened. Older adults actually reported more threat interpretations than younger adults to physical threat scenarios. Findings are discussed in terms of the aging relevance of anxiety triggers and theoretical accounts of age-related changes in emotional processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memories of social interactions: Age differences in emotional intensity.

The current study examined age differences in the intensity of emotions experienced during social interactions. Because emotions are felt most intensely in situations central to motivational goals, age differences in emotional intensity may exist in social situations that meet the goals for one age group more than the other. Guided by theories of emotional intensity and socioemotional selectivity, it was hypothesized that social partner type would elicit different affective responses by age. Younger (n = 71) and older (n = 71) adults recalled experiences of positive and negative emotions with new friends, established friends, and family members from the prior week. Compared with younger adults, older adults reported lower intensity positive emotions with new friends, similarly intense positive emotions with established friends, and higher intensity positive emotions with family members. Older adults reported lower intensity negative emotions for all social partners than did younger adults, but this difference was most pronounced for interactions with new friends. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive decline and human (Homo sapiens) aging: An investigation using a comparative neuropsychological approach.

Using a comparative neuropsychological approach, the authors compared performance of younger and healthy older adults ages 65 and over on tasks originally developed to measure cognition in animals. A battery of 6 tasks was used to evaluate object discrimination, egocentric spatial abilities, visual and spatial working memory, and response shifting. Older adults performed more poorly than younger adults on tasks that evaluate egocentric spatial abilities, response shifting, and to a lesser extent object recognition. The two groups did not differ for tasks that evaluate spatial working memory and object discrimination. The impairments the authors observed in tasks that evaluate response shifting and object recognition are consistent with those found in canines and primates as well as those found in Alzheimer's disease. The results are consistent with the notion that cognitive processes supported by the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex are among the first to decline with increasing age in both humans and animals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in the organization of emotion knowledge: Effects involving valence and time frame.

Older and younger adults attend to and remember emotion information differently. The present study builds on this work by investigating age-related differences in the schematic organization of emotion knowledge. Younger and older adults reported on their experiences of positive and negative affect, both today and in general. Of primary interest was judgment speed as a function of matches (e.g., positive-positive) or mismatches (e.g., negative-positive) in valence and time frame across consecutive trials. Older adults exhibited stronger valence-related priming effects and weaker time-frame-related priming effects, relative to younger adults. Results remained significant when controlling for individual differences in speed, speed variability, motor priming, temperament, and life satisfaction. The discussion focuses on the manner in which age differences in the schematic organization of emotion knowledge might contribute to age differences in the self-concept, affective processing, and emotional experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unpleasant situations elicit different emotional responses in younger and older adults.

Older adults report less distress in response to interpersonal conflicts than do younger adults, yet few researchers have examined factors that may contribute to these age differences. Emotion regulation is partially determined by the initial cognitive and emotional reactions that events elicit. The authors examined reported thoughts and emotions of younger and older adults (N = 195) while they listened to 3 different audiotaped conversations in which people were ostensibly making disparaging remarks about them. At 4 points during each scenario, the tape paused and participants engaged in a talk-aloud procedure and rated their level of anger and sadness. Findings reveal that older adults reported less anger but equal levels of sadness compared to younger adults, and their comments were judged by coders as less negative. Older adults made fewer appraisals about the people speaking on the tape and expressed less interest in learning more about their motives. Together, findings are consistent with age-related increases in processes that promote disengagement from offending situations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How does context affect assessments of facial emotion? The role of culture and age.

People from Asian cultures are more influenced by context in their visual processing than people from Western cultures. In this study, we examined how these cultural differences in context processing affect how people interpret facial emotions. We found that younger Koreans were more influenced than younger Americans by emotional background pictures when rating the emotion of a central face, especially those younger Koreans with low self-rated stress. In contrast, among older adults, neither Koreans nor Americans showed significant influences of context in their face emotion ratings. These findings suggest that cultural differences in reliance on context to interpret others' emotions depend on perceptual integration processes that decline with age, leading to fewer cultural differences in perception among older adults than among younger adults. Furthermore, when asked to recall the background pictures, younger participants recalled more negative pictures than positive pictures, whereas older participants recalled similar numbers of positive and negative pictures. These age differences in the valence of memory were consistent across culture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Saving the best for last: How adults treat social partners of different ages.

Older adults report more positive feelings and fewer problems in their relationships than do younger adults. These positive experiences may partially reflect how people treat older adults. Social partners may treat older adults more kindly due to their sense that time remaining to interact with these older adults is limited. Younger (n = 87, age 22 to 35) and older (n = 89, age 65 to 77) participants indicated how positively they would behave (i.e., express affection, proffer respect, send sentimental cards) and what types of conflict strategies they would use in response to hypothetical negative interactions with two close social partners, a younger adult and an older adult. Multilevel models revealed that participants were more avoidant and less confrontational when interacting with older adults than when interacting with younger adults. Time perspective of the relationship partially mediated these age differences. Younger and older participants were also more likely to select sentimental cards for older partners than for younger partners. Findings build on socioemotional selectivity theory and the social input model to suggest that social partners facilitate better relationships in late life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective preference in visual fixation away from negative images in old age? An eye-tracking study.

Recent studies have suggested that older individuals selectively forget negative information. However, findings on a positivity effect in the attention of older adults have been more mixed. In the current study, eye tracking was used to record visual fixation in nearly real-time to investigate whether older individuals show a positivity effect in their visual attention to emotional information. Young and old individuals (N = 64) viewed pairs of synthetic faces that included the same face in a nonemotional expression and in 1 of 4 emotional expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, or fear). Gaze patterns were recorded as individuals viewed the face pairs. Older adults showed an attentional preference toward happy faces and away from angry ones; the only preference shown by young adults was toward afraid faces. The age groups were not different in overall cognitive functioning, suggesting that these attentional differences are specific and motivated rather than due to general cognitive change with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in response to conformity pressure for emotional and nonemotional material.

Most theories of social influence do not consider adult development. Theoretical and empirical work in life span developmental psychology, however, suggests that age may reduce susceptibility to social influence. The present study examined age differences in social conformity for 2 classes of stimuli: judgments of geometric shapes and emotional facial expressions. As predicted, older people, compared with their younger counterparts, displayed lower rates of social conformity, and this age difference was most evident when judging emotional facial expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's and adults' recognition of spontaneous and posed emotional expressions in young children.

Investigated the degree to which 4–5 yr olds (n?=?48) can enact expressions of emotion recognizable by peers and adults; the study also examined whether accuracy of recognition was a function of age and whether the expression was posed or spontaneous. Adults (n?=?103) were much more accurate than children in recognizing neutral states, slightly more accurate in recognizing happiness and anger, and equally accurate in recognizing sadness. Children's spontaneous displays of happiness were more recognizable than posed displays, but for other emotions there was no difference between the recognizability of posed and spontaneous expressions. Children were highly accurate in identifying the facial expressions of happiness, sadness, and anger displayed by their peers. Sex and ethnicity of the child whose emotion was displayed interacted to influence only adults' recognizability of anger. Results are discussed in terms of the social learning and cognitive developmental factors influencing (a) adults' and children's decoding (recognition) of emotional expressions in young children and (b) encoding (posing) of emotional expressions by young children. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)