Emotion Recognition Deficits in the Elderly

Abstract

In two studies, healthy elderly adults were poor at recognizing certain emotions. In study one, an emotion face morphed to express a new emotion. The elderly were impaired when recognizing anger and sadness, whereas no differences were found between the two age groups in recognizing fear or happiness, or in a task requiring reasoning about non=emotion stimuli. In study two, the elderly were impaired when judging which of two faces was more angry, sad, or fearful, but they were not impaired when judging other emotions or when judging which of two beakers was more full. The elderly were also impaired when matching emotion sounds to angry, sad, and disgusted faces, but not to other emotions and not when matching non-emotion (e.g., machine) sounds to machines. Elderly deficits were independent of performance on a task requiring basic face processing (gender recognition). Overall, the results provide support for an age-related decline in the recognition of some emotions that is independent of changes in perceptual abilities, processing speed, fluid IQ, basic face processing abilities, and reasoning about non face stimuli. Recognition of emotion stimuli might be mediated by regions of the brain that are independent from those associated with a more general cognitive decline.

Age-related Differences in Emotion Recognition Ability: Visual and Auditory Modalities

“…This is not in accordance with recent research on age-related emotion recognition deficits, especially in recognizing emotion in faces (Sullivan & Ruffman, 2004;Orgeta & Phillips, 2008). …”

Age-related decline in the reflexive component of overt gaze following

“…Whilst most cognitive processes involved in social interactions are generally taken for granted, it has become apparent that some of these processes become less efficient in old age, which may explain why the elderly find social interactions more challenging with increasing age. For example, there are significant agerelated declines in theory of mind tasks which range from complex tasks such as reading of emotions (Slessor, Phillips, & Bull, 2007;Sullivan & Ruffman, 2004) to more specific aspects of social perception, such gaze detection (Slessor, Phillips, & Bull, 2008) and covert gaze cueing (Slessor, Laird, Phillips, Bull, & Filippou, 2010).…”

Older adults' decoding of emotions: Role of dynamic versus static cues and age-related cognitive decline.

“…Specifically, the majority of the studies conducted to date have asked older adults to categorize discrete emotions from static facial expressions (e.g., Isaacowitz et al, 2007;Sullivan & Ruffman, 2004). However, when older adults evaluate social emotions in everyday life, they receive much more information from their targets than is conveyed by a simple static image (e.g., dynamic nonverbal cues, body language, changes in tone of voice).…”