Age effects on social cognition: Faces tell a different story.

The authors administered social cognition tasks to younger and older adults to investigate age-related differences in social and emotional processing. Although slower, older adults were as accurate as younger adults in identifying the emotional valence (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral) of facial expressions. However, the age difference in reaction time was largest for negative faces. Older adults were significantly less accurate at identifying specific facial expressions of fear and sadness. No age differences specific to social function were found on tasks of self-reference, identifying emotional words, or theory of mind. Performance on the social tasks in older adults was independent of performance on general cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory) but was related to personality traits and emotional awareness. Older adults also showed more intercorrelations among the social tasks than did the younger adults. These findings suggest that age differences in social cognition are limited to the processing of facial emotion. Nevertheless, with age there appears to be increasing reliance on a common resource to perform social tasks, but one that is not shared with other cognitive domains. (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)     

Binocular rivalry: A window into emotional processing in aging.

Previous binocular rivalry studies with younger adults have shown that emotional stimuli dominate perception over neutral stimuli. Here we investigated the effects of age on patterns of emotional dominance during binocular rivalry. Participants performed a face/house rivalry task where the emotion of the face (happy, angry, neutral) and orientation (upright, inverted) of the face and house stimuli were varied systematically. Age differences were found with younger adults showing a general emotionality effect (happy and angry faces were more dominant than neutral faces) and older adults showing inhibition of anger (neutral faces were more dominant than angry faces) and positivity effects (happy faces were more dominant than both angry and neutral faces). Age differences in dominance patterns were reflected by slower rivalry rates for both happy and angry compared to neutral face/house pairs in younger adults, and slower rivalry rates for happy compared to both angry and neutral face/house pairs in older adults. Importantly, these patterns of emotional dominance and slower rivalry rates for emotional-face/house pairs disappeared when the stimuli were inverted. This suggests that emotional valence, and not low-level image features, were responsible for the emotional bias in both age groups. Given that binocular rivalry has a limited role for voluntary control, the findings imply that anger suppression and positivity effects in older adults may extend to more automatic tasks. (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)     

The effect of age on memory for emotional faces.

Prior studies of emotion suggest that young adults should have enhanced memory for negative faces and that this enhancement should be reduced in older adults. Several studies have not shown these effects but were conducted with procedures different from those used with other emotional stimuli. In this study, researchers examined age differences in recognition of faces with emotional or neutral expressions, using trial-unique stimuli, as is typically done with other types of emotional stimuli. They also assessed the influence of personality traits and mood on memory. Enhanced recognition for negative faces was found in young adults but not in older adults. Recognition of faces was not influenced by mood or personality traits in young adults, but lower levels of extraversion and better emotional sensitivity predicted better negative face memory in older adults. These results suggest that negative expressions enhance memory for faces in young adults, as negative valence enhances memory for words and scenes. This enhancement is absent in older adults, but memory for emotional faces is modulated in older adults by personality traits that are relevant to emotional processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is there an age-related positivity effect in visual attention? A comparison of two methodologies.

Research suggests a positivity effect in older adults' memory for emotional material, but the evidence from the attentional domain is mixed. The present study combined 2 methodologies for studying preferences in visual attention, eye tracking, and dot-probe, as younger and older adults viewed synthetic emotional faces. Eye tracking most consistently revealed a positivity effect in older adults' attention, so that older adults showed preferential looking toward happy faces and away from sad faces. Dot-probe results were less robust, but in the same direction. Methodological and theoretical implications for the study of socioemotional aging are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changes in the sensitivity to appetitive and aversive arousal across adulthood.

In 2 cross-sectional studies, the authors examined age-related differences in the evaluation of emotional stimuli in 2 community samples, with participants ranging in age from young to older adulthood (18–81 years old). Pictures of the International Affective Picture System were used in Study 1, and written verbs were used in Study 2. Participants rated these stimuli along the 2 major affective dimensions of hedonic valence and emotional arousal, thus yielding a 2-dimensional affective space for each participant. Young adults showed the expected pattern of 2 distinct clusters of stimuli in this space, representing increasing pleasantness (appetitive activation) and unpleasantness (aversive activation) with increasing emotional arousal. In contrast, for older adults, emotional valence and arousal ratings were linearly related: Low-arousing stimuli were rated as most pleasant, and high-arousing stimuli were rated as most unpleasant. When regressed on age, these changes revealed a gradual decrease of appetitive activation (i.e., the relationship between pleasure and arousal) across adulthood and a linear increase in aversive activation (i.e., the relationship between displeasure and arousal). These results extend previous work on emotional development, adding information as to the role of emotional intensity for affective experience in different age groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition of posed and spontaneous dynamic smiles in young and older adults.

In 2 studies, we investigated age effects in the ability to recognize dynamic posed and spontaneous smiles. Study 1 showed that both young and older adult participants were above chance in their ability to distinguish between posed and spontaneous smiles in young adults. In Study 2, we found that young adult participant performance declined when judging a combination of both young and older adult target smiles, while older adult participants outperformed young adult participants in distinguishing between posed and spontaneous smiles. A synthesis of results across the 2 studies showed a small-to-medium age effect (d = ?0.40), suggesting that older adults have an advantage in discriminating between smile types. Mixed stimuli (i.e., a mixture of young and older adult faces) may impact accurate smile discrimination. In future research, both the sources (cues) and behavioral effects of age-related differences in the discrimination of positive expressions should be investigated. (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)     

Preferences for emotional information in older and younger adults: A meta-analysis of memory and attention tasks.

The authors conducted a meta-analysis to determine the magnitude of older and younger adults' preferences for emotional stimuli in studies of attention and memory. Analyses involved 1,085 older adults from 37 independent samples and 3,150 younger adults from 86 independent samples. Both age groups exhibited small to medium emotion salience effects (i.e., preference for emotionally valenced stimuli over neutral stimuli) as well as positivity preferences (i.e., preference for positively valenced stimuli over neutral stimuli) and negativity preferences (i.e., preference for negatively valenced stimuli to neutral stimuli). There were few age differences overall. Type of measurement appeared to influence the magnitude of effects; recognition studies indicated significant age effects, where older adults showed smaller effects for emotion salience and negativity preferences than younger adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Updating positive and negative stimuli in working memory in depression.

Difficulties in the ability to update stimuli in working memory (WM) may underlie the problems with regulating emotions that lead to the development and perpetuation of mood disorders such as depression. To examine the ability to update affective material in WM, the authors had diagnosed depressed and never-disordered control participants perform an emotion 2-back task in which participants were presented with a series of happy, sad, and neutral faces and were asked to indicate whether the current face had the same (match-set) or different (break-set or no-set) emotional expression as that presented 2 faces earlier. Participants also performed a 0-back task with the same emotional stimuli to serve as a control for perceptual processing. After transforming reaction times to control for baseline group differences, depressed and nondepressed participants exhibited biases in updating emotional content that reflects the tendency to keep negative information and positive information, respectively, active in WM. Compared with controls, depressed participants were both slower to disengage from sad stimuli and faster to disengage from happy facial expressions. In contrast, nondepressed controls took longer to disengage from happy stimuli than from neutral or sad stimuli. These group differences in reaction times may reflect both protective and maladaptive biases in WM that underlie the ability to effectively regulate negative affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A tale of two negatives: Differential memory modulation by threat-related facial expressions.

Facial expressions serve as cues that encourage viewers to learn about their immediate environment. In studies assessing the influence of emotional cues on behavior, fearful and angry faces are often combined into one category, such as “threat-related,” because they share similar emotional valence and arousal properties. However, these expressions convey different information to the viewer. Fearful faces indicate the increased probability of a threat, whereas angry expressions embody a certain and direct threat. This conceptualization predicts that a fearful face should facilitate processing of the environment to gather information to disambiguate the threat. Here, we tested whether fearful faces facilitated processing of neutral information presented in close temporal proximity to the faces. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that, compared with neutral faces, fearful faces enhanced memory for neutral words presented in the experimental context, whereas angry faces did not. In Experiment 2, we directly compared the effects of fearful and angry faces on subsequent memory for emotional faces versus neutral words. We replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and extended them by showing that participants remembered more faces from the angry face condition relative to the fear condition, consistent with the notion that anger differs from fear in that it directs attention toward the angry individual. Because these effects cannot be attributed to differences in arousal or valence processing, we suggest they are best understood in terms of differences in the predictive information conveyed by fearful and angry facial expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attentional bias for threat in older adults: Moderation of the positivity bias by trait anxiety and stimulus modality.

Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that emotion regulation goals motivate older adults to preferentially allocate attention to positive stimuli and away from negative stimuli. This study examined whether anxiety moderates the effect of the positivity bias on attention for threat. The authors employed the dot probe task to compare subliminal and supraliminal attention for threat in 103 young and 44 older adults. Regardless of anxiety, older but not young adults demonstrated a vigilant–avoidant response to angry faces. Anxiety influenced older adults’ attention such that anxious individuals demonstrated a vigilant–avoidant reaction to sad faces but an avoidant–vigilant reaction to negative words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biased recognition of positive faces in aging and amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

We investigated age differences in biased recognition of happy, neutral, or angry faces in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 revealed increased true and false recognition for happy faces in older adults, which persisted even when changing each face’s emotional expression from study to test in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we examined the influence of reduced memory capacity on the positivity-induced recognition bias, which showed the absence of emotion-induced memory enhancement but a preserved recognition bias for positive faces in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment compared with older adults with normal memory performance. In Experiment 4, we used semantic differentials to measure the connotations of happy and angry faces. Younger and older participants regarded happy faces as more familiar than angry faces, but the older group showed a larger recognition bias for happy faces. This finding indicates that older adults use a gist-based memory strategy based on a semantic association between positive emotion and familiarity. Moreover, older adults’ judgments of valence were more positive for both angry and happy faces, supporting the hypothesis of socioemotional selectivity. We propose that the positivity-induced recognition bias might be based on fluency, which in turn is based on both positivity-oriented emotional goals and on preexisting semantic associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Older adults’ recognition of bodily and auditory expressions of emotion.

This study compared young and older adults’ ability to recognize bodily and auditory expressions of emotion and to match bodily and facial expressions to vocal expressions. Using emotion discrimination and matching techniques, participants assessed emotion in voices (Experiment 1), point-light displays (Experiment 2), and still photos of bodies with faces digitally erased (Experiment 3). Older adults’ were worse at least some of the time in recognition of anger, sadness, fear, and happiness in bodily expressions and of anger in vocal expressions. Compared with young adults, older adults also found it more difficult to match auditory expressions to facial expressions (5 of 6 emotions) and bodily expressions (3 of 6 emotions). (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)     

Aging and goal-directed emotional attention: Distraction reverses emotional biases.

Previous findings reveal that older adults favor positive over negative stimuli in both memory and attention (for a review, see Mather & Carstensen, 2005). This study used eye tracking to investigate the role of cognitive control in older adults' selective visual attention. Younger and older adults viewed emotional-neutral and emotional-emotional pairs of faces and pictures while their gaze patterns were recorded under full or divided attention conditions. Replicating previous eye-tracking findings, older adults allocated less of their visual attention to negative stimuli in negative-neutral stimulus pairings in the full attention condition than younger adults did. However, as predicted by a cognitive-control-based account of the positivity effect in older adults' information processing tendencies (Mather & Knight, 2005), older adults' tendency to avoid negative stimuli was reversed in the divided attention condition. Compared with younger adults, older adults' limited attentional resources were more likely to be drawn to negative stimuli when they were distracted. These findings indicate that emotional goals can have unintended consequences when cognitive control mechanisms are not fully available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging, source memory, and emotion.

In 2 experiments we assessed younger and older adults' ability to remember contextual information about an event. Each experiment examined memory for 3 different types of contextual information: (a) perceptual information (e.g., location of an item); (b) conceptual, nonemotional information (e.g., quality of an item); and (c) conceptual, emotional information (e.g., safety of an item). Consistent with a large literature on aging and source memory, younger adults outperformed older adults when the contextual information was perceptual in nature and when it was conceptual, but not emotional. Age differences in source memory were eliminated, however, when participants recalled emotional source information. These findings suggest that emotional information differentially engages older adults, possibly evoking enhanced elaborations and associations. The data are also consistent with a growing literature, suggesting that emotional processing remains stable with age (e.g., Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994, 1998; Isaacowitz, Charles, & Carstensen, 2000). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of Visual Scanning as Predictors of Emotion Identification in Normal Aging.

Emotion identification appears to decline with age, and deficient visual scanning may contribute to this effect. Eye movements of 20 older adults (OAs) and 20 younger adults (YAs) with normal saccades were recorded while viewing facial expressions. OAs made fewer fixations overall, and they made a higher proportion of fixations to the lower halves of faces. Topographical distribution of fixations predicted better OA accuracy for identifying disgust than other negative emotions. Impaired OA accuracy for fear and anger was specific to vision, with normal identification of these emotions in the auditory domain. Age-related frontal-lobe atrophy may affect the integrity of the frontal eye fields, with consequent scanning abnormalities that contribute to difficulties in identifying certain emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and emotional memory: Cognitive mechanisms underlying the positivity effect.

Younger adults tend to remember negative information better than positive or neutral information (negativity bias). The negativity bias is reduced in aging, with older adults occasionally exhibiting superior memory for positive, as opposed to negative or neutral, information (positivity bias). Two experiments with younger (N = 24 in Experiment 1, N = 25 in Experiment 2; age range: 18?35 years) and older adults (N = 24 in both experiments; age range: 60?85 years) investigated the cognitive mechanisms responsible for age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional information. Results from diffusion model analyses (R. Ratcliff, 1978) indicated that the effects of valence on response bias were similar in both age groups but that Age × Valence interactions emerged in memory retrieval. Specifically, older adults experienced greater overall familiarity for positive items than younger adults. We interpret this finding in terms of an age-related increase in the accessibility of positive information in long-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)