Abstract
Age-group membership effects on explicit emotional facial expressions recognition have been widely demonstrated. In this study we investigated whether Age-group membership could also affect implicit physiological responses, as facial mimicry and autonomic regulation, to observation of emotional facial expressions. To this aim, facial Electromyography (EMG) and Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) were recorded from teenager and adult participants during the observation of facial expressions performed by teenager and adult models. Results highlighted that teenagers exhibited greater facial EMG responses to peers' facial expressions, whereas adults showed higher RSA-responses to adult facial expressions. The different physiological modalities through which young and adults respond to peers' emotional expressions are likely to reflect two different ways to engage in social interactions with coetaneous. Findings confirmed that age is an important and powerful social feature that modulates interpersonal interactions by influencing low-level physiological responses.
Highlights
An accurate recognition and classification of emotional facial expressions is highly relevant for humans and their social interactions
The present study investigated, for the first time, the effect of Age-group membership on both facial mimicry and autonomic regulation to emotional facial expressions
These results demonstrated the existence of an Age-group membership effect on facial mimicry as well as on autonomic regulation (i.e., Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA)-response)
Summary
An accurate recognition and classification of emotional facial expressions is highly relevant for humans and their social interactions. Ethnic group membership [3,4,5,6] and gender [7,8,9,10] are two studied factors which modulate face decoding and emotional facial expressions recognition Another relevant feature of human faces that determines group membership is age. Faces belonging to someone being the same age of the perceiver are better remembered [12], capture greater attention [13] and induce longer looking time, resulting in a better emotional expressions identification [14] Overall, these findings suggest that individuals are more likely to attend and to explicitly respond to social signals coming from peers, than to those coming from older or younger individuals. A possible modulation of physiological responses consequent to an of Age-group membership effect would indicate that age operates at a pre-reflective, automatic and unconscious level, opening new intriguing avenues, in the investigation of the evolutionarily-determined physiological responses implicated in the regulation of social behaviour
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