The present thesis investigated age differences in emotion recognition skills of 146 older adults (age range 60-92 years) and 146 young adults (age range 18-25 years) in four experiments. Experiment 1 assessed participants� ability to categorise facial expressions of sadness, fear, happiness, and surprise. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants were asked to identify six emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust) from still and dynamic faces, alone and in combination with vocal expressions. Finally, Experiment 4 compared performance on these standard emotion recognition paradigms to that of more ecologically-valid measures; the Faux Pas and Verbosity and Social Cues Tasks.
Across the four studies, there was evidence of an age-related decline in emotion recognition skills. Older adults were overall less sensitive to perceptual differences between faces in Experiment 1 and showed a loss of categorical perception effect for fearful faces. Older adults were less accurate than young adults at recognising expressions of sadness, anger, and fear, across types of expression (voices and faces). There were some differences across modalities, with older adults showing difficulties with fear recognition for faces, but not voices, and difficulty in matching happy voices to happy faces but not for happy voices and faces presented in isolation. Experiment 2 also showed that the majority of older adult participants had some decline in emotion recognition skills.
Age differences in performance were also apparent on the more ecologically-valid measures. Older adults were more likely than young adults to rate the protagonist as behaving inappropriately in the Faux Pas Task, even with the control videos, suggesting difficulty in discriminating faux pas. Older adults were also judged to be more verbose and to offer more off-topic information during the Verbosity Task than young adults and were less likely to recognise expressions of boredom in the Social Cues Task.
These findings are discussed in terms of three theoretical accounts. A positivity bias (indicating increased recognition and experience of positive emotions and reduction for negative emotions) was not consistent with the older adults� difficulties with matching happy faces to voices and relatively preserved performance with disgusted expressions. Age-related decline in cognitive processes did not account for the specific pattern of age differences observed. The most plausible explanation for the age differences in the present thesis is that age-related neurological changes in the brain areas that process emotions, specifically the temporal and frontal areas, are likely to contribute to the older adults� declines in performance on emotion categorisation, emotion recognition, and social cognition tasks. The implications for everyday social interactions for older adults are also discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/222197 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Ryan, Melissa-Sue, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Otago. Department of Psychology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://policy01.otago.ac.nz/policies/FMPro?-db=policies.fm&-format=viewpolicy.html&-lay=viewpolicy&-sortfield=Title&Type=Academic&-recid=33025&-find), Copyright Melissa-Sue Ryan |
Page generated in 0.0016 seconds