Task characteristics influence facial emotion recognition age-effects: A meta-analytic review.

Abstract

Relative to their young counterparts, older adults are poorer at recognizing facial expressions. A 2008 meta-analysis of 17 facial emotion recognition data sets showed that these age-related difficulties are not uniform. Rather, they are greatest for the emotions of anger, fear, and sadness, comparative with happiness and surprise, with no age-effect found for disgust. Since then, there have been many methodological advances in assessing emotion recognition. The current comprehensive meta-analysis systematically tested the influence of task characteristics (e.g., photographs vs. videos). The meta-analysis included 102 data sets that compared facial emotion recognition in older and young adult samples (N = 10,526). With task type combined, the pattern of age-effects across emotions was mostly consistent with the previous meta-analysis (i.e., largest age-effects for anger, fear, sadness; no effect for disgust). However, the magnitude and direction of age-effects were strongly influenced by elements of task design. Specifically, videos produced relatively moderate age-effects across all emotions, which indicates that older adults may not exhibit a positivity effect for facial emotion recognition. For disgust recognition, older adults demonstrated superior accuracy to young adults for the most common image set (Pictures of Facial Affect). However, they were poorer than young adults at recognizing this emotion for all other stimulus formats and image sets, which suggests that they do not retain disgust recognition. We discuss the implications that such diversity in the age-effects produced by different facial emotion recognition task designs has for understanding real-world deficits and task selection in future emotion recognition studies.

Age-related differences in negative cognitive empathy but similarities in positive affective empathy

“…They engaged a neural network that comprised bilateral insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and anterior cingulate, core nodes of the salience network (Menon, 2015; Menon et al, 2010), with cognitive empathy to negative emotions. This finding aligns with behavioral evidence that older compared to younger adults experience greater difficulty with processing negative emotions than with positive emotions (Hayes et al, 2020; Ruffman et al, 2008). Our findings also corroborate evidence of increased prefrontal cortex and insula activity for negative emotions in older adults, possibly reflecting more processing effort for and/or greater salient response when processing negative compared to positive stimuli with advanced age (Ebner et al, 2012; Ziaei et al, 2016a).…”

Social Cognition in a Research Domain Criteria Perspective: A Bridge Between Schizophrenia and Autism Spectra Disorders

“…Indeed, the combination of genetics and neuroimaging in a study of the association between variants of genetic loci linked to SSD and SC in healthy individuals found that those with an increased risk score (taking into account the combined risk of such genetic loci) presented changes in the ACC when evaluating episodic memory and changes in the PCC when the ToM was evaluated (162). Some inconsistencies across studies were observed both in neuroimaging correlates and behavioral performance of SC in SSD and ASD, which can partly be the results of differences in task design: task characteristics have been shown to have an influence on outcomes and interpretation of social cognition performance assessment, and the choice of appropriate measures, balancing task sensitivity and ecological validity, represents an important factor that should be consistently taken account in the design of future studies (163). Moreover, it is possible that isolating SC in different components, such as emotion processing and ToM, might not be ideal, as in the realworld context of interpersonal relationships all these separate domains are likely to be involved in determining social behaviors (164).…”

“…Some inconsistencies across studies were observed both in neuroimaging correlates and behavioral performance of SC in SSD and ASD, which can partly be the results of differences in task design: task characteristics have been shown to have an influence on outcomes and interpretation of social cognition performance assessment, and the choice of appropriate measures, balancing task sensitivity and ecological validity, represents an important factor that should be consistently taken account in the design of future studies ( 163 ). Moreover, it is possible that isolating SC in different components, such as emotion processing and ToM, might not be ideal, as in the real-world context of interpersonal relationships all these separate domains are likely to be involved in determining social behaviors ( 164 ).…”

Development of a short‐form version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test for assessing theory of mind in older adults

“…Social cognitive impairment is now recognized to be a common and often debilitating feature of many clinical disorders, including many neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders 1 . There is also a large literature showing that social cognitive difficulties are evident in normal adult aging with moderate age effects identified in meta‐analytic reviews of this literature 3‐5 …”

“…1 There is also a large literature showing that social cognitive difficulties are evident in normal adult aging with moderate age effects identified in meta-analytic reviews of this literature. [3][4][5] Theory of mind (ToM), one of the core domains of social cognitive function, 1 refers to the ability to infer the mental state of another person and to appreciate that another person may hold a belief that differs from their own understanding of reality. 6 Older adults generally perform more poorly than younger adults on tests that index this construct, and these age-related differences persist even after controlling for broader age-related cognitive changes.…”