Abstract
Recently, some authors have suggested that age-related impairments in social-cognitive abilities—emotion recognition (ER) and theory of mind (ToM)—may be explained in terms of reduced motivation and effort mobilization in older adults. We examined performance on ER and ToM tasks, as well as corresponding control tasks, experimentally manipulating self-involvement. Sixty-one older adults and 57 young adults were randomly assigned to either a High or Low self-involvement condition. In the first condition, self-involvement was raised by telling participants were told that good task performance was associated with a number of positive, personally relevant social outcomes. Motivation was measured with both subjective (self-report questionnaire) and objective (systolic blood pressure reactivity—SBP-R) indices. Results showed that the self-involvement manipulation did not increase self-reported motivation, SBP-R, or task performance. Further correlation analyses focusing on individual differences in motivation did not reveal any association with performance, in either young or older adults. Notably, we found age-related decline in both ER and ToM, despite older adults having higher motivation than young adults. Overall, the present results were not consistent with previous claims that motivation affects older adults’ social-cognitive performance, opening the route to potential alternative explanations.
Highlights
Empirical evidence has consistently shown that aging negatively affects social-cognitive skills, namely, emotion recognition and theory of mind
One young participant was excluded because of anomalous CV-R values
We report exclusively systolic blood pressure (SBP) results because previous studies suggested that SBP is an accurate index of effort and motivation [34], we note that the main results were the same regardless of whether using SPB, diastolic blood pressure (DBP) or heart rate (HR)
Summary
Empirical evidence has consistently shown that aging negatively affects social-cognitive skills, namely, emotion recognition and theory of mind. Emotion recognition (ER) refers to the ability to detect emotions as they are conveyed through different social stimuli, including facial expression, gaze direction, prosody of voices, bodily posture, and movements. Many studies have demonstrated an age-related decline in the ability to recognize emotions from facial, vocal, and bodily stimuli (for a review, see [1]). This decline has important implications for a variety of dimensions of social functioning, such as faux pas detection [2], verbosity [3], lie detection ability [4], and social attitudes [5].
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