Facial expressions and the ability to recognize emotions from the eyes or mouth: A comparison among old adults, young adults, and children

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to contribute to the literature on the ability to recognize anger, happiness, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, and neutral emotions from facial information (whole face, eye region, mouth region). More specifically, the aim was to investigate older adults' performance in emotions recognition using the same tool used in the previous studies on children and adults’ performance and verify if the pattern of emotions recognition show differences compared with the other two groups. Results showed that happiness is among the easiest emotions to recognize while the disgust is always among the most difficult emotions to recognize for older adults. The findings seem to indicate that is more easily recognizing emotions when pictures represent the whole face; compared with the specific region (eye and mouth regions), older participants seems to recognize more easily emotions when the mouth region is presented. In general, the results of the study did not detect a decay in the ability to recognize emotions from the face, eyes, or mouth. The performance of the old adults is statistically worse than the other two groups in only a few cases: in anger and disgust recognition from the whole face; in anger recognition from the eye region; and in disgust, fear, and neutral emotion recognition from mouth region.