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Abstract
The identification of non-verbal emotional signals, and especially of facial expressions, is essential for successful social communication among humans. Previous research has reported an age-related decline in facial emotion identification, and argued for socio-emotional or aging-brain model explanations. However, more perceptual differences in the gaze strategies that accompany facial emotional processing with advancing age have been under-explored yet. In this study, 22 young (22.2 years) and 22 older (70.4 years) adults were instructed to look at basic facial expressions while their gaze movements were recorded by an eye-tracker. Participants were then asked to identify each emotion, and the unbiased hit rate was applied as performance measure. Gaze data were first analyzed using traditional measures of fixations over two preferential regions of the face (upper and lower areas) for each emotion. Then, to better capture core gaze changes with advancing age, spatio-temporal gaze behaviors were deeper examined using data-driven analysis (dimension reduction, clustering). Results first confirmed that older adults performed worse than younger adults at identifying facial expressions, except for “joy” and “disgust,” and this was accompanied by a gaze preference toward the lower-face. Interestingly, this phenomenon was maintained during the whole time course of stimulus presentation. More importantly, trials corresponding to older adults were more tightly clustered, suggesting that the gaze behavior patterns of older adults are more consistent than those of younger adults. This study demonstrates that, confronted to emotional faces, younger and older adults do not prioritize or ignore the same facial areas. Older adults mainly adopted a focused-gaze strategy, consisting in focusing only on the lower part of the face throughout the whole stimuli display time. This consistency may constitute a robust and distinctive “social signature” of emotional identification in aging. Younger adults, however, were more dispersed in terms of gaze behavior and used a more exploratory-gaze strategy, consisting in repeatedly visiting both facial areas.
Highlights
Facial emotion processing is widely recognized as a key aspect of everyday life
It is not surprising that facial emotion recognition has been extensively investigated across the lifespan (Somerville et al, 2011), with particular focus on aging, which is frequently associated with isolation and social withdrawal
To control for potential gender differences in emotion identification (Hall et al, 2000), this variable was initially entered as a between-subject factor in the analyses
Summary
Facial emotion processing is widely recognized as a key aspect of everyday life. Accurately decoding emotions in other people’s faces is a primary means of non-verbal communication (Ekman and Oster, 1979; Smith et al, 2005), associated with wellbeing (Carton et al, 1999; English and Carstensen, 2014b) and overall life satisfaction (Ciarrochi et al, 2000). Results from previous studies are generally consistent, showing that older adults are less accurate than younger adults at discriminating and identifying negative facial expressions, especially those of “anger,” “fear,” and “sadness” (Calder et al, 2003; Ruffman et al, 2008; Chaby et al, 2015; Grainger et al, 2015; Templier et al, 2015; Mather, 2016) This emotional shift could emerge stepwise from the fourth decade of life (Calder et al, 2003; Chaby and Narme, 2009). Given the potential consequences of these difficulties in everyday social interactions, it seems important to understand more about the nature of emotion processing changes in late adulthood
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