Sociocognitive approaches suggest that the ability to understand emotions should be well maintained in adult aging. However, neuropsychological evidence suggests potential impairments in processing emotions in older adults. In the current study, 30 young adults (aged 20-40 years) and 30 older adults (aged 60-80 years) were tested on a range of emotional ability measures. There were no age effects on the ability to decode emotions from verbal material. Older people were less able to identify facial expressions of anger and sadness, and showed poorer ability to identify theory of mind from pictures of eyes. The results indicate specific age-related deficits in identifying some aspects of emotion from faces, but no age effects on the understanding of emotions in verbal descriptions.

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Together, these studies provide important and novel insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may be expected to experience difficulties in perceiving facial emotions.

Younger and older adults differ in performance on a range of social-cognitive skills, with older adults having difficulties in decoding nonverbal cues to emotion and intentions. Such skills are likely to be important when deciding whether someone is being sarcastic. In the current study we investigated in a life span sample whether there are age-related differences in the interpretation of sarcastic statements. Using both video and verbal materials, 116 participants aged between 18 and 86 completed judgments about whether statements should be interpreted literally or sarcastically. For the verbal stories task, older adults were poorer at understanding sarcastic intent compared with younger and middle-aged participants, but there was no age difference in interpreting control stories. For the video task, older adults showed poorer understanding of sarcastic exchanges compared with younger and middle-aged counterparts, but there was no age difference in understanding the meaning of sincere interactions. For the videos task, the age differences were mediated by the ability to perceive facial expressions of emotion. Age effects could not be explained in terms of variance in working memory. These results indicate that increased age is associated with specific difficulties in using nonverbal and contextual cues to understand sarcastic intent. (PsycINFO Database Record

There is evidence that some emotional expressions are characterized by diagnostic cues from individual face features. For example, an upturned mouth is indicative of happiness, whereas a furrowed brow is associated with anger. The current investigation explored whether motivating people to perceive stimuli in a local (i.e., feature-based) rather than global (i.e., holistic) processing orientation was advantageous for recognizing emotional facial expressions. Participants classified emotional faces while primed with local and global processing orientations, via a Navon letter task. Contrary to previous findings for identity recognition, the current findings are indicative of a modest advantage for face emotion recognition under conditions of local processing orientation. When primed with a local processing orientation, participants performed both significantly faster and more accurately on an emotion recognition task than when they were primed with a global processing orientation. The impacts of this finding for theories of emotion recognition and face processing are considered.