Age Differences in Emotion Recognition Between Chinese Younger and Older Adults

Abstract

Given that cultural background might be an important factor that influences emotion processing, this study investigated age differences in emotion recognition between 30 younger and 30 older Chinese adults in a facial go/no-go task. In this task, participants were required to recognize faces of different emotional expressions (happy, neutral, and sad) and selectively respond to the faces with a certain emotional expression. Results showed that older adults were significantly slower than younger adults in sad-face recognition, but there were no age differences in happy-face recognition. The results echo earlier findings collected with Western adults, suggesting a universal age-related decline in recognition of negative information. In addition, there was a negative correlation between the facial emotion recognition bias (RTsad-RThappy) and the negative emotional experience in older adults, suggesting that the age-related reduction in negative emotional experiences might be related to the reduced negative face recognition in older adults.