Age differences in emotion recognition: A question of modality?

Abstract

Previous research has suggested age deficits in unimodal emotion recognition tasks. In 2 studies with independent samples, we tested the idea that older adults' performance will be enhanced in multimodal emotion recognition tasks. In each study, participants were presented with newly developed film clips, each portraying a young or an old woman while she relived an emotional memory. As a first step, participants received the film clips in each of 3 unimodal conditions (facial, lexical, prosodic). As a second step, participants were presented with tasks that contained different combinations of these modalities. Consistent with prior research, younger adults outperformed older adults in unimodal facial and prosodic tasks (Study 1) or in all 3 unimodal tasks (Study 2). As predicted, older adults profited more from multimodal stimuli than young adults so that there were no age deficits in the multimodal tasks (Studies 1 and 2). The findings support the idea that the ecological validity of laboratory tasks influence age differences in emotion recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record

Keeping track of emotions: audiovisual integration for emotion recognition and compensation for sensory degradations captured by perceptual strategies

“…Rather, when only considering the intact conditions, there was no significant age group by condition interaction, indicating that the difference in accuracy remained roughly the same across A, V, and AV conditions. Therefore, unlike what has been previously reported 122,151 , we find that older participants are as good as younger participants at integrating auditory and visual information, but not better. Wieck and Kunzmann 151 already proposed that divergent findings could be due to differences in the quality of the emotion expression.…”

“…Overall, we found that while ageing leads to a general decline in emotion recognition 148,149 , it does not have an effect on audiovisual integration abilities. Contrary to the findings from Chapter 4, it has been proposed that audiovisual integration is enhanced in ageing, both in general, for example for stimulus detection or localization, but also for speech recognition 177,178 and in particular for emotion perception 122,151 .…”

“…It has been proposed that audiovisual emotion recognition peaks between 15 and 30 years of age and declines linearly after that 150 . Despite this general decline, there is some evidence that older adults benefit more from multimodal stimuli than younger adults such that no age-related deficits could be established in the multimodal conditions 122,151 .…”

“…Based on existing literature, we expected that older participants would have worse performance on emotion recognition than young participants 148,149 . However, for intact audiovisual stimulus conditions, older adults might recognize the expressed emotions with the same accuracy as younger adults, owing to previous work showing that audiovisual integration provides a larger benefit for older adults 122,151 . Additionally, we expected that older adults would perform as well as, or even better than young adults for positive emotions, both in intact audiovisual and unimodal conditions 123,[153][154][155] .…”

Auditory and Visual Integration for Emotion Recognition and Compensation for Degraded Signals are Preserved With Age

“…In our experiment, due to the large number of different emotions included, the emotional cues in each modality may have been subtler and more complex than in previous studies, such that integrating auditory and visual cues does not necessarily resolve all ambiguity. The chance of that happening is much smaller when there are fewer emotions being portrayed; Wieck and Kunzmann (2017) only presented two emotions (anger and sadness), and Hunter et al, presented four (fear, sadness, disgust, and anger). In our study, in contrast, 12 emotions (of which six were negative) were used, and some were closely related (e.g., anger and irritation).…”