Does the Positivity Effect Apply to Emotion Recognition? Examining Emotion Recognition across Adulthood

Abstract

Research indicates older adults can experience a decline in the ability to identify negative facial emotional expressions while having less difficulty with positive emotions, a finding termed the ‘positivity effect’. We investigated whether the positivity effect is related to the traditional method for studying emotion recognition and the finding that older adults have less negative affect in general. Participants, ranging in age from 19 to 80 years old, viewed videos and pictures of emotional expressions balanced in valence, arousal, and complexity. Though older adults rated the positive stimuli as more positive and intense than younger adults, we did not find a decline in emotion identification accuracy with age. Mood was, for the most part, unrelated to emotion recognition. The findings highlight the need for a more nuanced approach to understanding emotion recognition.