Decline of Affective Prosody Recognition with a Positivity Bias among Older Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Abstract

Purpose: Understanding how older adults perceive and interpret emotional cues in speech prosody contributes to our knowledge of cognitive aging. This study provides a systematic review with meta-analysis to investigate the extent of the decline in affective prosody recognition (APR) among older adults in terms of overall and emotion-specific performance and explore potential moderators that may cause between-study heterogeneity. Method: Incorporated into the literature search were six electronic databases, with a specific emphasis on studies comparing the APR performance of older adults with that of younger adults. This comparison was focused on basic emotions. Meta-regression analyses were executed to pinpoint potential moderators related to demographic and methodological characteristics. Results: A total of 19 studies were included in the meta-analysis, involving 560 older adults with a mean age of 69.15 years. The findings indicated a substantial negative effect size (g = －1.21). Furthermore, the magnitude of aggregated effect sizes showed a distinct valence-related recognition pattern with positive prosody exhibiting smaller effect sizes. Years of education were found to moderate the overall performance effect estimate while age and gender significantly influenced the effect estimate of happiness. Conclusions: The results confirmed a significant decline in APR ability among older adults, but this decline was unbalanced across basic emotions. Educational level emerged as a significant factor influencing APR ability. Moreover, participants with a higher mean age exhibited notably poorer performance in recognizing happy prosody. These findings underscore the need to further investigate the neurobiological mechanisms for APR decline associated with aging.