Older Adults Respond Quickly to Angry Faces Despite Labeling Difficulty

Abstract

Two experiments examined young-old differences in speed of identifying emotion faces and labeling of emotion expressions. In Experiment 1, participants were presented arrays of 9 faces in which all faces were identical (neutral expression) or 1 was different (angry, sad, or happy). Both young and older adults were faster identifying faces as "different" when a discrepant face expressed anger than when it expressed sadness or happiness, and this was true whether the faces were schematics or photographs of real people. In Experiment 2, participants labeled the Experiment 1 schematic and real faces. Older adults were significantly worse than young when labeling angry schematic faces, and angry and sad real faces. Together, this research indicates no age differences in identifying discrepant angry faces from an array, although older adults do have difficulty choosing the correct emotion label for angry faces.

Age differences in conscious versus subconscious social perception: The influence of face age and valence on gaze following.

“…This is consistent with studies showing that both young and older adults rapidly and automatically detect emotional information in a visual search task, regardless of valence (Leclerc & Kensinger, 2008), as well as evidence that young and older adults demonstrate equivalent levels of spontaneous mimicry of happy and angry subliminal faces (Bailey & Henry, 2009). The data align more specifically with studies showing that older adults do not differ from young in implicit threat detection (Mather & Knight, 2006;Ruffman et al, 2009), and are capable of processing positive information when voluntary control is limited (Allard & Isaacowitz, 2008;Bannerman et al, 2011). Taken together, the evolutionary drive that promotes automatic avoidance of threat and approach of reward (see Davis & Whalen, 2001) appears to persist into older adulthood.…”

“…Moreover, recall that older adults are as proficient as young in tasks assessing early, and therefore relatively automatic responding to threatening faces (Mather & Knight, 2006;Ruffman et al, 2009), including when presented subliminally (Bailey & Henry, 2009). There is further evidence for the biological significance of approaching reward (Davis & Whalen, 2001), suggesting that older adults' attention might also be subconsciously cued by positive expressions, such as happiness.…”

Facial Emotion Recognition in Bipolar Disorder and Healthy Aging

“…On the contrary, few studies have found increased emotional response to negative stimuli in older adults. In particular, older adults demonstrated deficits in experiencing and recognizing angry facial emotions (Ruffman et al, 2009;Vanyukov et al, 2014), but there may be qualitative differences hidden by static face recognition. Thus, it seems important to test whether older adults would have difficulties recognizing angry faces using a more dynamic paradigm.…”

Preserved Emotional Modulation of Motor Response Time Despite Psychomotor Slowing in Young-Old Adults

“…On the other hand, in a recent study (Ruffman, Ng, & Jenkin, 2009), both young and older adults were faster distinguishing schematic and photographic faces as "different" when a discrepant face expressed anger than when it expressed sadness or happiness. Similarly, affective priming and the automatic attentional bias during detection of threatening facial expressions (Hahn, Carlson, Singer, & Gronlund, 2006;LaBar et al, 2005) have been reported to be no different between older adults and younger adults.…”