Investigating Age-Related Neural Compensation During Emotion Perception Using Electroencephalography.

Tao Yang,Pei Sun,Michael J Banissy,Caroline Di Bernardi Luft,Joydeep Bhattacharya

doi:10.3390/brainsci10020061

Tao Yang, Pei Sun + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci10020061

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Abstract

Previous research suggests declines in emotion perception in older as compared to younger adults, but the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we address this by investigating how “face-age” and “face emotion intensity” affect both younger and older participants’ behavioural and neural responses using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixteen young and fifteen older adults viewed and judged the emotion type of facial images with old or young face-age and with high- or low- emotion intensities while EEG was recorded. The ERP results revealed that young and older participants exhibited significant ERP differences in two neural clusters: the left frontal and centromedial regions (100–200 ms stimulus onset) and frontal region (250–900 ms) when perceiving neutral faces. Older participants also exhibited significantly higher ERPs within these two neural clusters during anger and happiness emotion perceptual tasks. However, while this pattern of activity supported neutral emotion processing, it was not sufficient to support the effective processing of facial expressions of anger and happiness as older adults showed reductions in performance when perceiving these emotions. These age-related changes are consistent with theoretical models of age-related changes in neurocognitive abilities and may reflect a general age-related cognitive neural compensation in older adults, rather than a specific emotion-processing neural compensation.

Highlights

The perception of emotional facial expression plays an important role in interpersonal communication [1,2]
Emotional expression can alter the meaning of speech and the ability to accurately identify emotional content is important in social interactions [2]
The aim of the present study is to examine age-related changes in emotion perception and to further reveal the underlying neural mechanisms

Summary

Introduction

The perception of emotional facial expression plays an important role in interpersonal communication [1,2]. Difficulties with emotion perception are associated with specific types of social impairment, including poor interpersonal interaction, reduced social competence and loneliness (e.g., [3,4]). These outcomes can have negative impacts on health and wellbeing (e.g., [5]), establishing how the capacity for emotion perception is affected as a function of normal adult aging is an important challenge. Most studies have consistently demonstrated that older adults appear to have declined perception of some negative facial expressions of emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear and surprise (e.g., [6,7,8,9,10]).

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