Aging and emotional expressions: is there a positivity bias during dynamic emotion recognition?

Alberto Di Domenico,Beth Fairfield,Rocco Palumbo,Nicola Mammarella

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01130

Abstract

In this study, we investigated whether age-related differences in emotion regulation priorities influence online dynamic emotional facial discrimination. A group of 40 younger and a group of 40 older adults were invited to recognize a positive or negative expression as soon as the expression slowly emerged and subsequently rate it in terms of intensity. Our findings show that older adults recognized happy expressions faster than angry ones, while the direction of emotional expression does not seem to affect younger adults’ performance. Furthermore, older adults rated both negative and positive emotional faces as more intense compared to younger controls. This study detects age-related differences with a dynamic online paradigm and suggests that different regulation strategies may shape emotional face recognition.

Highlights

Face perception is one of the most well developed visual skills in human beings
Older adults detected happy expressions faster than angry expressions while younger adults did not show any differences in the time it took them to recognize facial expression
This pattern of performance seems to be linked to the emotional valence of the facial expression since we did not find any differences between the two groups when we asked them to complete a subsequent forced choice recognition phase to evaluate general recognition difficulties

Summary

Introduction

Face perception is one of the most well developed visual skills in human beings It is a skill present from the very early stages of life (Johnson et al, 1991) and holds a crucial role in social communication (Haxby et al, 2000). Face perception, sensitive to aging and clinical conditions, plays an adaptive role (Zebrowitz et al, 2015). Contrary to this adaptive function in which we would expect negative faces to have an advantage, literature in emotional face recognition has constantly identified a behavioral recognition advantage for happy faces with respect to negative ones (Calvo and Beltrán, 2013). We were interested in examining emotional biases and preferences in online recognition of emotional faces that may be more closely related to motivational preferences (Fairfield et al, 2015a)

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