Age-related changes in multisensory emotional speech perception: Evidence for a dual-pathway model.

Previous studies have produced inconsistent findings regarding whether age-related declines in emotion perception affect various verbal and nonverbal channels to the same extent and whether they are linked to cognitive ability. This study systematically explored age-related differences in multisensory emotional speech perception and their associations with overall cognitive functioning. Thirty-three older adults (22 females) and 32 young adults (22 females) completed two Stroop-like tests examining the perceptual salience of verbal semantics, vocal prosody, and facial expressions. The cross-channel auditory Stroop-like test contrasted semantics with prosody, while the cross-modal Stroop-like test further incorporated visual facial expressions to examine the salience patterns among all three channels. Participants selectively attended to emotional information from one sensory channel while ignoring congruent or incongruent cues from others. Overall, older adults demonstrated reduced ability in multisensory emotional speech perception with greater preferences for congruent information across channels compared to young adults. In addition, they displayed perceptual salience of semantics over prosody, whereas young adults leaned toward prosody in both Stroop-like tests. Despite these age-related shifts in channel salience for the two auditory channels, both groups prioritized visual facial expressions over prosodic and semantic cues during audiovisual processing. These salience patterns were particularly pronounced under incongruent conditions, which had significant associations with overall cognitive capacities of the older adults. Together, these findings delineate how individual differences in age and cognition shape Stroop effects in multisensory emotional speech perception, with complex interplay between channel asymmetry and information congruity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The degree to which the perception of spoken emotion is lateralized in the brain remains a controversial topic. This work examines hemispheric differences in the perception of emotion in speech by applying tDCS, a neurostimulation protocol, to the T-RES speech emotion rating paradigm. We find several significant effects, including a strong interaction of prosody and neurostimulation for perceptual ratings when considering only lexical content, and that the perception of happiness does not appear to be affected by tDCS, but anger and (to a large extent) fear appear less intense after stimulation.

<p>A talker’s emotional state is one important type of information carried by the speech signal. While the frequency and amplitude compression performed by hearing aids may make speech easier to understand, little is known about how such processing affects users’ perception of emotion in speech. This study investigated how hearing aid use affected the perception of emotion in speech and the recognition of speech spoken with emotion. Listeners were hearing aid users who were tested with and without their aids in separate sessions. They heard sentences spoken by a young female actor portraying different vocal emotions, and were asked to report the keyword and identify the portrayed emotion. The use of hearing aids improved listeners’ word recognition performance from 43% correct (unaided) to 68% correct (aided). In contrast, hearing aids did not improve listeners’ emotion identification (38% unaided, compared to 40% aided). Emotions that were more easily identified were not necessarily the same emotions associated with better word recognition. We conclude that the types of information carried by the speech signal are differentially affected by hearing aids; in this case, hearing aids improved the recognition of what was spoken but not the identification of vocal emotion.</p>

<p>A talker’s emotional state is one important type of information carried by the speech signal. While the frequency and amplitude compression performed by hearing aids may make speech easier to understand, little is known about how such processing affects users’ perception of emotion in speech. This study investigated how hearing aid use affected the perception of emotion in speech and the recognition of speech spoken with emotion. Listeners were hearing aid users who were tested with and without their aids in separate sessions. They heard sentences spoken by a young female actor portraying different vocal emotions, and were asked to report the keyword and identify the portrayed emotion. The use of hearing aids improved listeners’ word recognition performance from 43% correct (unaided) to 68% correct (aided). In contrast, hearing aids did not improve listeners’ emotion identification (38% unaided, compared to 40% aided). Emotions that were more easily identified were not necessarily the same emotions associated with better word recognition. We conclude that the types of information carried by the speech signal are differentially affected by hearing aids; in this case, hearing aids improved the recognition of what was spoken but not the identification of vocal emotion.</p>

Purpose: This study aimed to identify the age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the effects of semantics and prosody.Methods: Thirty-two young adults and 32 elderly adults participated in this study. We implemented the test for rating of emotions in speech. The participants were presented with spoken sentences, which consisted of four emotional categories (anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral) in terms of prosody and semantics. In the general rating tasks, the participants were asked to listen to the sentences and rated the degree of the speaker’s emotions. In the attention rating tasks, the participants were asked to focus on only one cue (prosody and semantics) and to rate how much they agree with the speaker’s emotion.Results: The young group scored significantly higher than the elderly group on the general rating tasks and attention rating tasks. The elderly group scored higher on the semantic tasks than on the prosodic tasks, while the young group scored similarly on the semantic and prosodic tasks.Conclusion: The elderly adults have lower abilities to perceive emotion in speech than the young adults. They have difficulty in using the prosodic cues of emotional speech. In addition, the elderly adults try to use the semantic cues of emotional speech in order to compensate for their poor abilities to process the prosodic cues.

Perception of happy and sad facial expressions in chronic schizophrenia: Evidence for two evaluative systems

Previous research suggests declines in emotion perception in older as compared to younger adults, but the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we address this by investigating how “face-age” and “face emotion intensity” affect both younger and older participants’ behavioural and neural responses using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixteen young and fifteen older adults viewed and judged the emotion type of facial images with old or young face-age and with high- or low- emotion intensities while EEG was recorded. The ERP results revealed that young and older participants exhibited significant ERP differences in two neural clusters: the left frontal and centromedial regions (100–200 ms stimulus onset) and frontal region (250–900 ms) when perceiving neutral faces. Older participants also exhibited significantly higher ERPs within these two neural clusters during anger and happiness emotion perceptual tasks. However, while this pattern of activity supported neutral emotion processing, it was not sufficient to support the effective processing of facial expressions of anger and happiness as older adults showed reductions in performance when perceiving these emotions. These age-related changes are consistent with theoretical models of age-related changes in neurocognitive abilities and may reflect a general age-related cognitive neural compensation in older adults, rather than a specific emotion-processing neural compensation.

Introduction: The objective of the study was to analyze complex auditory skills (music abilities and emotional speech perception) in children with cochlear implant (CI) compared to normal-hearing controls. Methods: This was a prospective case-control study. A total of 30 controls and 28 children (7–14 years) with congenital severe-to-profound hearing loss (HL) with unilateral or bilateral CI underwent the pitch discrimination test (PDT), the songs identification test (SIT), and the melodies identification test (MIT) to measure music abilities; the speaker and gender discrimination and emotions identification auditory test (SDEIAT) to evaluate socioemotional speech perception. Results: Controls had significantly higher PDT, MIT, and SDEIAT scores than CI recipients (p < 0.05). Patients with asymmetrical HL and bimodal stimulation (CI and hearing aid) had significantly better MIT scores than unilateral (p = 0.007) and bilateral CIs (p = 0.013). In the bilateral CI group, patients with a history of sequential implantation had significant lower scores in melodic recognition than simultaneous CI (p = 0.005). Pitch discrimination was not related to the age of patients or to music exposure time. An inverse relationship existed between musical abilities and age of cochlear implantation (Pearson’s R = −0.62), with better results before 24 months (p = 0.039). Controls and CI users recognized the gender of the speakers equally; bimodal stimulation identified complex emotions significantly better than the other groups (p < 0.05). SDEIAT was statistically related to SIT (Pearson’s R = 0.59), PDT (Pearson’s R = 0.67), and age of implantation (Pearson’s R = −0.54) with better result the lower the age of surgery. Conclusion: The close relationship between emotional speech perception, music abilities, and pitch discrimination confirmed the importance to improve complex linguistic auditory tasks that are rarely examined in clinical practice but fundamental for social interactions in children affected by congenital HL.

The strength and vulnerability integration (SAVI) model posits that development across the adult lifespan is accompanied by improvements in emotion regulation and declines in physiological flexibility. Due to these age-related changes, emotional well-being is expected to be higher among older (vs. younger) adults when they experience no or only minor stressors. In contrast, more intense stressors should lead to lower well-being among older adults. We develop and test a conceptual model based on the SAVI model in the work context that focuses on experienced incivility as a moderator of the indirect effects of employee age on changes in two indicators of occupational well-being (i.e., job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion) through emotion regulation and physiological disease. Experienced incivility is a workplace stressor that may weaken the beneficial effects of emotion regulation and intensify the detrimental effects of physiological disease. Data were collected from 781 employees across three time points, spanning 4 months. Results showed that age had indirect effects on (a) increases in job satisfaction through emotion regulation, (b) decreases in emotional exhaustion through emotion regulation, (c) decreases in job satisfaction through physiological disease, and (d) increases in emotional exhaustion through physiological disease. Out of the four hypothesized interaction effects, only the indirect effect of age on decreases in emotional exhaustion through emotion regulation was, as expected, weaker and nonsignificant when experienced incivility was high (vs. low). These findings provide partial support for our model and imply that future theory development on age and occupational well-being should consider both age-related strengths and vulnerabilities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Most typically developed individuals have the ability to perceive emotions encoded in speech; yet, factors such as age or environmental conditions can restrict this inherent skill. Noise pollution and multimedia over-stimulation are common components of contemporary society, and have shown to particularly impair a child’s interpersonal skills. Assessing the influence of such features on the perception of emotion over different developmental stages will advance child-related research. The presented work evaluates how background noise and emotionally connoted visual stimuli affect a child’s perception of emotional speech. A total of 109 subjects from Spain and Germany (4–14 years) evaluated 20 multi-modal instances of nonsense emotional speech, under several environmental and visual conditions. A control group of 17 Spanish adults performed the same perception test. Results suggest that visual stimulation, gender, and the two sub-cultures with different language background do not influence a child’s perception; yet, background noise does compromise their ability to correctly identify emotion in speech—a phenomenon that seems to decrease with age.

Background: Social cognition, including emotion perception, is impaired in people with serious mental illnesses (SMI), and is associated with cognitive and community functioning. Cognitive remediation can improve neurocognition, but the impact on emotion perception has been less well studied. The current study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of a cognitive remediation programme in improving emotion perception. Methods: Thirty-seven people with SMI and a history of difficulties obtaining employment were randomised to either vocational rehabilitation only, or vocational rehabilitation combined with cognitive remediation. Participants were assessed at baseline and post-treatment on a neurocognitive battery, work history, and emotion perception. Results: The cognitive remediation group did not improve more than the vocational rehabilitation only group on either measure of emotion perception, despite significantly greater gains in cognitive functioning. Baseline emotion identification, but not discrimination, was significantly associated with cognition and work history. Conclusions: Despite associations between social and neurocognition, there was no evident transfer of cognitive gains to performance on measures of emotion perception. The findings, though limited by a small sample size, are important in expanding the research indicating that the effects of cognitive remediation tend to be limited to the specific cognitive domains targeted in the program.

People with multiple sclerosis (MS) can experience problems in interpreting others' emotions from faces or voices. However, to date little is known about whether difficulties in emotion perception in MS are related to broader aspects of social functioning. Also, there are few studies reporting the effect of MS on more ecologically valid assessments of emotion perception using multimodal videos. The current study looks at (1) the effect of MS on perceiving emotions from faces, voices and multimodal videos; (2) the possible role of slowed processing and executive dysfunction in emotion perception problems in MS and (3) the relationship between emotion perception and broader social functioning in MS. 53 people with MS and 31 healthy controls completed tasks of emotion perception and cognition, and assessed their levels of social support and social participation. Participants with MS performed worse than demographically matched controls on all measures of emotion perception. Emotion perception performance was related to cognitive measures in those with MS. Also, significant associations were found between emotion perception difficulties in MS and poorer social function. In particular, people with MS who had poorer emotion perception also reported lower levels of social support from their friends, and regression analysis showed that this prediction was maintained even when disease severity and cognitive function were taken into account. These results show that problems with emotion perception in MS extend to more realistic tasks and may predict key aspects of social functioning.

Smiling and sad wrinkles: Age-related changes in the face and the perception of emotions and intentions

Cognitive functioning has historically been used to predict adaptive outcomes of people with autism spectrum disorders; however, research shows that it is not a complete predictor. The current study explored whether emotion perception was a predictor of adaptive outcomes, and more specifically, hypothesized that emotion perception (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-2 error scores) would mediate adaptive functioning of people with autism spectrum disorder (Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, Second Edition). People with autism spectrum disorders demonstrated significantly lower adaptive functioning and emotion perception skills compared to typically developing individuals. Emotion perception acted as a significant mediator for socialization, but not communication or daily living skills, highlighting that in people with autism spectrum disorders, lower socialization abilities is the result, in part, of emotion perception deficits. It was unexpected that emotion perception was not a mediator for communication skills. This may be related to sample restrictions, or the narrow focus on emotion perception. Future research should involve a larger, more inclusive autism spectrum disorder sample, broaden approaches to exploring relationships between social perception and adaptive outcomes, and relate findings to brain mechanisms underlying emotion perception.

Emotion perception is fundamental to affective and cognitive development and is thought to involve distributed brain circuits. Efforts to chart neurodevelopmental changes in emotion have been severely hampered by narrowly focused approaches centered on activation of individual brain regions and small sample sizes. Here we investigate the maturation of human functional brain circuits associated with identification of fearful, angry, sad, happy, and neutral faces using a large sample of 759 children, adolescents, and adults (ages 8-23; female/male = 419/340). Network analysis of emotion-related brain circuits revealed three functional modules, encompassing lateral frontoparietal, medial prefrontal-posterior cingulate, and subcortical-posterior insular cortices, with hubs in medial prefrontal, but not posterior cingulate, cortex. This overall network architecture was stable by age 8, and it anchored maturation of circuits important for salience detection and cognitive control, as well as dissociable circuit patterns across distinct emotion categories. Our findings point to similarities and differences in functional circuits associated with identification of fearful, angry, sad, happy, and neutral faces, and reveal aspects of brain circuit organization underlying emotion perception that are stable over development as well as features that change with age. Reliability analyses demonstrated the robustness of our findings and highlighted the importance of large samples for probing functional brain circuit development. Our study emphasizes a need to focus beyond amygdala circuits and provides a robust neurodevelopmental template for investigating emotion perception and identification in psychopathology.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Emotion perception is fundamental to cognitive and affective development. However, efforts to chart neurodevelopmental changes in emotion perception have been hampered by narrowly focused approaches centered on the amygdala and prefrontal cortex and small sample sizes. Using a large sample of 759 children, adolescents, and adults and a multipronged analytical strategy, we investigated the development of brain network organization underlying identification and categorization of fearful, happy, angry, sad, and neutral facial expressions. Results revealed a developmentally stable modular architecture that anchored robust age-related and emotion category-related changes in brain connectivity across multiple brain systems that extend far beyond amygdala circuits and provide a new template for investigation of emotion processing in the developing brain.