Compensating for age limits through emotional crossmodal integration.

Laurence Chaby,Monique Plaza,Viviane Luherne-Du Boullay,Mohamed Chetouani

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00691

Abstract

Social interactions in daily life necessitate the integration of social signals from different sensory modalities. In the aging literature, it is well established that the recognition of emotion in facial expressions declines with advancing age, and this also occurs with vocal expressions. By contrast, crossmodal integration processing in healthy aging individuals is less documented. Here, we investigated the age-related effects on emotion recognition when faces and voices were presented alone or simultaneously, allowing for crossmodal integration. In this study, 31 young adults (M = 25.8 years) and 31 older adults (M = 67.2 years) were instructed to identify several basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and a neutral expression, which were displayed as visual (facial expressions), auditory (non-verbal affective vocalizations) or crossmodal (simultaneous, congruent facial and vocal affective expressions) stimuli. The results showed that older adults performed slower and worse than younger adults at recognizing negative emotions from isolated faces and voices. In the crossmodal condition, although slower, older adults were as accurate as younger except for anger. Importantly, additional analyses using the “race model” demonstrate that older adults benefited to the same extent as younger adults from the combination of facial and vocal emotional stimuli. These results help explain some conflicting results in the literature and may clarify emotional abilities related to daily life that are partially spared among older adults.

Highlights

Emotion recognition is a fundamental component of social cognition
We found a significant effect of modality on the scores [F(2,120) = 137.54, p < 0.001, ε = 0.92, η2p = 0.7] and the response times (RT) [F(2,120) = 62.48, p < 0.001, ε = 0.88, η2p = 0.51], indicating that participants responded more effectively under the crossmodal condition than under either unimodal condition
While a large body of evidence shows that older adults are less accurate than younger adults in recognizing specific emotions from emotional faces, fewer studies have examined vocal emotion recognition, and hardly any studies have investigated the recognition of emotion from emotional faces and voices presented simultaneously (Hunter et al, 2010; Lambrecht et al, 2012)

Summary

Introduction

Emotion recognition is a fundamental component of social cognition. The ability to discriminate and interpret others’ emotional states from emotional cues plays a crucial role in social functioning and behaviors (Carton et al, 1999; Adolphs, 2006; Corden et al, 2006; Frith and Frith, 2012). Impaired recognition of others’ emotional states may result in severe social dysfunctions, including inappropriate social behaviors, poor interpersonal communication and reduced quality of life (Feldman et al, 1991; Shimokawa et al, 2001; Blair, 2005). Such difficulties have been observed in disorders characterized. Aging and multimodal emotional integration by prominent social-behavioral deficits (i.e., autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, neurodegenerative dementia; e.g., Chaby et al, 2012; and see for review Kennedy and Adolphs, 2012; Kumfor et al, 2014) and in normal aging, which is frequently associated with social withdrawal and loneliness (e.g., Szanto et al, 2012; Steptoe et al, 2013)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion