Absence of age differences in emotion perception and gaze patterns using a contextually rich film-based assessment

Abstract

Age differences in emotion perception are now well documented. However, a key limitation of many studies in this literature is the reliance on highly artificial tasks that lack context and consequently have poor ecological validity. This study reports two separate experiments that investigated age differences in emotion perception abilities using a highly contextualised film-based assessment along with a traditional emotion perception task. Experiment 2 additionally included a middle-aged sample and an assessment of eye-gaze patterns to the emotional films. The inclusion of eye-tracking in Experiment 2 was motivated by the fact that older adults consistently show visual biases to static emotion stimuli, yet it remains unclear whether biases also emerge in response to dynamic contextualised emotion stimuli. Experiment 1 identified age effects recognising displays of anger in the traditional emotion perception task but no age differences emerged on the film-based task. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 with significant group differences on the traditional emotion perception task but no age differences on the film-based task. Experiment 2 also showed that there were no age differences in gaze patterns to these stimuli, showing for the first time that age-related visual biases to emotion stimuli may be task dependent. These findings highlight the fact that task-related features play a key role in the evaluation of age effects in emotion perception.

Enhancing ecological validity of gaze-cueing stimuli is associated with increased gaze following for older but not younger adults.

“…This finding aligns with broader literature showing ecologically valid stimuli appear to enhance older adults’ performance on tasks spanning several subcomponents of social cognition (see Blanke & Riediger, 2019, for a review). For example, previous research has found that enhancing stimuli ecological validity in emotion recognition tasks improves performance for older adults and reduces age effects (e.g., Grainger & Henry, 2022; Richter et al, 2011; Stanley & Isaacowitz, 2015; Wieck & Kunzmann, 2017). Overall, then, the present study aligns with extant literature which has demonstrated that ecological validity is not only an important factor in any consideration of age effects in social cognition but also meaningfully extends this literature by showing, for the first time, that this is the case for gaze following.…”