Older adults get masked emotion priming for happy but not angry faces: evidence for a positivity effect in early perceptual processing of emotional signals.

In higher-level cognitive tasks, older compared to younger adults show a bias towards positive emotion information and away from negative information (a positivity effect). It is unclear whether this effect occurs in early perceptual processing. This issue is important for determining if the positivity effect is due to automatic rather than controlled processing. We tested this with older and younger adults on a positive/negative face emotion valence classification task using masked priming. Positive (happy) and negative (angry) face targets were preceded by masked repetition or valence primes with neutral face baselines. In Experiment 1, 30 younger and 30 older adults were tested with 50 ms primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative targets. Older adults showed repetition priming for positive but not negative targets. Neither group showed valence priming. In Experiment 2, 30 older and 29 younger adults were tested with longer duration primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative emotions, and no valence priming. Older adults only showed repetition and valence priming for positive targets. We proposed older adults' lack of angry face priming was due to an early attention orienting strategy favouring happy expressions at the expense of angry ones.

Managers' experiences of providing end-of-life care under the Home Care Package Program.

OBJECTIVE: The study explored the experiences of Australian aged care providers in supporting clients on a home care package to die at home. METHODS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 13 aged care managers responsible for delivering services under the Home Care Package Program. Interviews were analysed thematically. RESULTS: Four themes emerged that illuminated managers' experiences: struggling to meet a preference to die at home; lack of opportunities to build workforce capacity in end-of-life care; challenges in negotiating fragmented funding arrangements between health and aged care providers; and mixed success in collaborating across sectors. CONCLUSIONS: Aged care providers want to support older Australians who prefer to stay at home at the end of life. However, most clients are admitted to a residential facility when their care needs exceed a home care budget long before a specialist palliative care team will intervene. Budgets for health and aged care providers must be sufficient and flexible to support timely access to end-of-life care, to reward collaboration across sectors and to invest in building palliative care skills in the nursing and personal care workforce.

Older adults' emotion recognition: No auditory-visual benefit for less clear expressions.

The ability to recognise emotion from faces or voices appears to decline with advancing age. However, some studies have shown that emotion recognition of auditory-visual (AV) expressions is largely unaffected by age, i.e., older adults get a larger benefit from AV presentation than younger adults resulting in similar AV recognition levels. An issue with these studies is that they used well-recognised emotional expressions that are unlikely to generalise to real-life settings. To examine if an AV emotion recognition benefit generalizes across well and less well recognised stimuli, we conducted an emotion recognition study using expressions that had clear or unclear emotion information for both modalities, or clear visual, but unclear auditory information. Older (n = 30) and younger (n = 30) participants were tested on stimuli of anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust (expressed in spoken sentences) in auditory-only (AO), visual-only (VO), or AV format. Participants were required to respond by choosing one of 5 emotion options. Younger adults were more accurate in recognising emotions than older adults except for clear VO expressions. Younger adults showed an AV benefit even when unimodal recognition was poor. No such AV benefit was found for older adults; indeed, AV was worse than VO recognition when AO recognition was poor. Analyses of confusion responses indicated that older adults generated more confusion responses that were common between AO and VO conditions, than younger adults. We propose that older adults' poorer AV performance may be due to a combination of weak auditory emotion recognition and response uncertainty that resulted in a higher cognitive load.

Using a second-person approach to identify disease-specific profiles of social behavior in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Changes in social behavior are recognized as potential symptoms of behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and semantic dementia (SD), yet objective ways to assess these behaviors in natural social situations are lacking. This study takes a truly social (or second-person) approach and examines changes in real-world social behavior in different dementia syndromes, by analyzing non-scripted social interactions in bvFTD patients (n = 20) and SD patients (n = 20), compared to patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (n = 20). Video recordings of 10-min conversations between patients and behavioral neurologists were analyzed for the presence of socially engaging (e.g., nodding, smiling, gesturing) and disengaging behavior (e.g., avoiding eye contact, self-grooming, interrupting). Results demonstrated disease-specific profiles, with bvFTD patients showing less nodding and more looking away than AD, and SD patients showing more gesturing than AD. A principal components analysis revealed the presence of four unobserved components, showing atypical disengaging patterns of behavior. Whole-brain voxel-based morphometry analyses revealed distinct neurobiological bases for each of these components, with the brain regions identified previously associated with behavior selection, abstract mentalization and processing of multi-sensory and socially-relevant information, in mediating socially engaging and disengaging behavior. This study demonstrates the utility of systematic behavioral observation of social interactions in the differential diagnosis of dementia.