Abstract
The correct interpretation of emotional expressions is crucial for social life. However, emotions in old relative to young faces are recognized less well. One reason for this may be decreased signal clarity of older faces due to morphological changes, such as wrinkles and folds, obscuring facial displays of emotions. Across three experiments, the present research investigates how misattributions of emotions to elderly faces impair emotion discrimination. In a preliminary task, neutral expressions were perceived as more expressive in old than in young faces by human raters (Experiment 1A) and an automatic system for emotion recognition (Experiment 1B). Consequently, task difficulty was higher for old faces relative to young faces in a visual search task (Experiment 2). Specifically, participants detected old faces expressing negative emotions less accurately and slower among neutral faces of their peers than young faces among neutral faces of their peers. Thus, we argue that age-related changes in facial features are the most plausible explanation for the differences in emotion perception between young and old faces. These findings are of relevance for the social interchange with the elderly, especially when multiple older individuals are present.
Highlights
Would you rather approach someone who looks happy or mad? Because individuals live in and depend on groups, we take note of each other’s emotional expressions and react in accordance with the information provided by them
The analysis revealed a main effect of face age, F(1,44) = 25.56, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.37, such that overall, neutral old faces (M = 0.92, SE = 0.10) were rated as more expressive than neutral young faces (M = 0.77, SE = 0.10)
The primary purpose of Experiment 2 was to assess whether face age impairs the recognition of emotional targets among a neutral set of faces of same sex peers in a visual search task
Summary
Would you rather approach someone who looks happy or mad? Because individuals live in and depend on groups, we take note of each other’s emotional expressions and react in accordance with the information provided by them. We are likely to approach someone who shows happiness, as this emotion signals that the person is pleased with the current situation. Emotional expressions can serve as an important means of communication (Parkinson, 1996) and convey distinct social signals that can have important effects on the social behavior of others (Van Kleef et al, 2010; Hareli and Hess, 2012; Weisbuch and Adams, 2012). For the perceiver to benefit from the information conveyed by the emotional displays of others and to react with the most adaptive social behavior, these displays first have to be decoded successfully. People are rather good at decoding facial expressions of emotion, especially with the highly prototypical ones used in most research to date (Tracy and Robins, 2008; Hess and Thibault, 2009).
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