Abstract
Although younger and older adults appear to attend to and remember emotional faces differently, less is known about age-related differences in the subjective emotional impression (arousal, potency, and valence) of emotional faces and how these differences, in turn, are reflected in age differences in various emotional tasks. In the current study, we used the same facial emotional stimuli (angry and happy faces) in four tasks: emotional rating, attention, categorical perception, and visual short-term memory (VSTM). The aim of this study was to investigate effects of age on the subjective emotional impression of angry and happy faces and to examine whether any age differences were mirrored in measures of emotional behavior (attention, categorical perception, and memory). In addition, regression analyses were used to further study impression-behavior associations. Forty younger adults (range 20–30 years) and thirty-nine older adults (range 65–75 years) participated in the experiment. The emotional rating task showed that older adults perceived less arousal, potency, and valence than younger adults and that the difference was more pronounced for angry than happy faces. Similarly, the results of the attention and memory tasks demonstrated interaction effects between emotion and age, and age differences on these measures were larger for angry than for happy faces. Regression analyses confirmed that in both age groups, higher potency ratings predicted both visual search and VSTM efficiency. Future studies should consider the possibility that age differences in the subjective emotional impression of facial emotional stimuli may explain age differences in attention to and memory of such stimuli.
Highlights
The effects of age on the processing of emotional facial expression have been investigated in a broad range of emotion-cognition domains, such as attention (e.g., Isaacowitz et al, 2006), memory (e.g., Mather and Carstensen, 2003), and categorical perception (Kiffel et al, 2005)
The results showed a relationship between arousal ratings, potency ratings, and attention measures for angry faces, such that higher ratings on those scales were associated with shorter reaction times (RTs) in a visual search task
The results of all of the four tasks used in this study showed an age-related flattening of emotional impression of facial expressions that was more pronounced for angry than for happy faces
Summary
The effects of age on the processing of emotional facial expression have been investigated in a broad range of emotion-cognition domains, such as attention (e.g., Isaacowitz et al, 2006), memory (e.g., Mather and Carstensen, 2003), and categorical perception (Kiffel et al, 2005). This pattern of results from individual studies has been confirmed in a meta-analysis by Ruffman et al (2008), who found that the largest age-related decrease occurred in the recognition of angry, fearful, and sad faces and that less of a decrease occurred in the recognition of happy and surprised faces
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