Be Happy Not Sad for Your Youth: The Effect of Emotional Expression on Age Perception

Abstract

Perceived age is a psychosocial factor that can influence both with whom and how we choose to interact socially. Though intuition tells us that a smile makes us look younger, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists to explain how age-irrelevant emotional expressions bias the subjective decision threshold for age. We examined the role that emotional expression plays in the process of judging one’s age from a face. College-aged participants were asked to sort the emotional and neutral expressions of male facial stimuli that had been morphed across eight age levels into categories of either “young” or “old.” Our results indicated that faces at the lower age levels were more likely to be categorized as old when they showed a sad facial expression compared to neutral expressions. Mirroring that, happy faces were more often judged as young at higher age levels than neutral faces. Our findings suggest that emotion interacts with age perception such that happy expression increases the threshold for an old decision, while sad expression decreases the threshold for an old decision in a young adult sample.

Yawning Detection Sensitivity and Yawning Contagion

“…This allowed us to parametrically adjust along multiple dimensions including age, gender, ethnicity, and emotional expression. We chose to use FaceGen because it has been validated by human participant rating ( Roesch et al., 2011 ) and has been widely used in studies related to emotional expression (e.g., Hass, Weston, & Lim, 2016 ; N’Diaye, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2009 ; Oosterhof & Todoro, 2009 ). To prepare the final 12 face stimuli to test participants’ sensitivity to detect happy faces, we first generated 36 happy faces from four identities (two females) with FaceGen Modeler by varying expressiveness at 0%, 12%, 25%, 32%, 50%, 62%, 75%, 87%, and 100%.…”

The effects of smiling on perceived age defy belief

“…The erroneous belief that smiling makes one appear younger could have potentially biased the results of relevant studies that did not consider the effects common beliefs have on overt age classifications. For example, Hass et al (2016) asked participants to make general age classifications into two broad categories of Bold^versus Byoung^f or a series of computerized faces that did not include several realistic attributes, such as wrinkles. It is possible, therefore, that decisions in this study were influenced by semantic knowledge and by commonly-held beliefs about age, which could have biased the age classifications of smiling faces as being younger, not older, compared to neutral faces.…”

“…We proposed that the Baging^effect of smiling originates from people's inability to ignore the wrinkles that form around the eyes during smiling. Still, the scarce literature on the effect of smiling on perceived age is inconsistent (Hass, Weston, & Lim, 2016;Voelkle et al, 2012), and this inconsistency may be due to the clear discrepancy between the actual effect of smiling on perceived age and the common belief that smiling makes one look younger. The current study was explicitly designed to see if this discrepancy between perception and belief can exist in the same individual.…”

A variety of processes that affect the perception of skin aging

“…Emotional expression is a significant determinant of perceived age [29]. Positive facial expression could be expected to trigger positive stereotypes when assessing age, and negative facial expressions might have the opposite effect [30]. Smiling makes people appear friendlier and more attractive than does the display of a neutral expression [31].…”