The Effects of Age and Gender on the Perception of Lexical Emotion

Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the perception of lexical/verbal emotion across the adult life span. Secondary goals were to examine the contribution of gender and valence (i.e., pleasantness/unpleasantness) to the processing of lexical emotional stimuli. Participants were 28 young (ages 20-39), 28 middle-aged (ages 40-59), and 28 older (ages 60-85) right-handed adults; there were 14 men and 14 women in each age group. Age groups were comparable on demographic and cognitive variables. Participants made accuracy judgments and intensity ratings of emotional (both positive and negative) and nonemotional stimuli from lexical perception tasks from the New York Emotion Battery (Borod, Welkowitz, & Obler, 1992). Accuracy and intensity measures were not significantly correlated. When age was examined, older participants perceived emotional and nonemotional lexical stimuli with significantly less accuracy than did younger and middle-aged participants. On the other hand, older participants evaluated the nonemotional lexical stimuli as significantly more intense than younger participants. When gender was examined, lexical stimuli were processed more accurately by female than male participants. Further, emotional stimuli were rated more intense by female participants. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

Low alpha power (7.5-9.5 Hz) changes during positive and negative affective learning

“…The precise reason for this pattern of results is unclear, although such results are possibly attributable to the basal effect of the verbal nature of the stimuli, as was specified by Ali and Cimino. Relatedly, Grunwald et al (1999) suggested that studies in which the perception of emotional words has been examined (i.e., lateralized paradigms, such as tachistoscopic techniques) have been less conclusive with regard to hemispheric specialization for emotion than have paradigms in which facial emotion or emotional prosody has been examined (for a review, see Borod, Bloom, & Haywood, 1998). The reason(s) for the inconclusiveness are poorly understood, although they may be attributable in part to similar weaknesses in experimental design, as described below.…”

Imageability and subjective frequency of the 500 rated nouns in the Croatian Lexical Database

“…Those authors concluded that greater life experience may help raters image words, which would be consistent with the fact that older speakers use infrequent nouns more often than younger speakers, implying a larger vocabulary (Kave, Samuel-Enoch & Adiv, 2009). On the other hand, Grunwald et al (1999) found that older participants perceived lexical stimuli with significantly lower accuracy than younger participants. In addition, those authors found that women processed lexical stimuli more accurately than men.…”

Lexical Emotional Expression Across the Life Span: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses of Word List Generation Tasks

“…The age groups did not differ signi®cantly from each other when analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were performed on these variables. This group of participants also served as the subjects in a study on lexical emotional perception (Grunwald et al, 1999).…”

“…Although there has been a fair amount of recent research on the neuropsychology of emotional language (for review, see Borod, Bloom, & Haywood, 1998), performance on measures of emotional language in healthy normal adults across the life span have only recently been directly examined (Grunwald et al, 1999). Grunwald et al (1999) examined the perception of lexical emotional stimuli as a function of age and found that older subjects perceived lexical stimuli less accurately than younger subjects in both emotional (E) and nonemotional (NE) conditions. In addition, lexical emotional expression was examined in these same subjects (Grunwald, 1995) using a measure of total output, and there were no changes with age.…”

“…While studies examining accuracy (see above) have typically shown decline with age, studies examining emotional intensity have been more equivocal, with some studies showing decline (Lawton, Kleban, Rajagopal, & Dean, 1992;Palmore, 1981), some no change (Dougherty, Abe, & Izard, 1996;Moreno, Borod, Welkowitz, & Alpert, 1990), and others showing increases (Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994;Grunwald et al, 1999) with age.…”