Age Differences In Emotion Recognition: Task Demands Or Perceptual Dedifferentiation?

Background/Study Context: Older adults (OA) have consistently shown lower accuracy compared with younger adults (YA) when labeling facial expressions of emotion in multiple choice tasks. However, OA do not show lower accuracy when judging psychological attributes from faces in rating tasks. The authors investigated whether the cognitive demands of multiple choice tasks yields an underestimation of OA emotion recognition ability and whether lower scores by OA in emotion recognition tasks are an instance of age-related dedifferentiated face perception. METHODS: Younger and older adults judged the emotions of faces depicting various expressions using (a) a multiple choice task and (b) a rating task with separate scales for each expression. We computed both accuracy scores and an emotion differentiation index, adapted from previous work on neural activation to different stimulus categories. RESULTS: Lower OA performance in emotion recognition do not reflect the cognitive demands of a multiple choice task, since age differences also were shown when assessing emotion expressions on independent rating scales. An index calculating differentiation of the emotion expressions supported the hypothesis that age differences in emotion recognition accuracy may reflect age-related perceptual dedifferentiation. DISCUSSION: Results are consistent with other evidence for perceptual dedifferentiation in OA, including lower OA performance in face recognition tasks, rating faces more similarly to one another on trait dimensions, and less specificity in neural activation to faces.

Aging-Related Changes in Decoding Negative Complex Mental States from Faces.

Background/Study Context: Many studies have found age-related declines in emotion recognition, with older adult (OA) deficits strongest for negative emotions. Some evidence suggests that OA also show worse performance in decoding complex mental states. However, no research has investigated whether those deficits are stronger for negative states. METHODS: The authors investigated OA (ages 65-93) and younger adult (YA; ages 18-22) performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RME), a well-validated measure of the ability to decode complex mental states from faces. RESULTS: The authors replicated findings showing OA deficits in this task. Using a multilevel logistic model, the authors found that the poorer performance of OA was due to worse performance on items for which a negative state was the correct answer. When analyzing each age group separately, OA scored worse on negative than positive items, whereas YA performance did not vary as a function of item valence. These age differences on the RME could not be explained by differences in lower-level visual function. CONCLUSION: These findings show that previously documented OA deficits in perceiving basic negative emotional expressions are also present in reading complex mental states.

Face Shape and Behavior: Implications of Similarities in Infants and Adults.

We investigated conceptual overlap between literature demonstrating links between adult facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) and behavior and that demonstrating links between infant FWHR and temperament by investigating whether babyfaceness is associated with FWHR and behavior at both ages. Babyfaceness was positively correlated with FWHR in both infants and adults. Babyfaceness also was correlated with an infant temperament that is a precursor of bolder behavior in childhood and adulthood, just as a broader infant FWHR was previously shown to be. These results call into question existing explanations for relationships between facial appearance and adult assertive or aggressive behavior. Previously, behavioral correlates of adult FWHR have been attributed to influences of pubertal testosterone, and correlates of adult babyfaceness have been attributed to compensation for undesirable stereotypes. Our findings indicate that the pre-natal developmental influences required to explain appearance-temperament relationships in infancy also should be considered as explanations for appearance-behavior relationships in adulthood.

The attractiveness halo effect and the babyface stereotype in older and younger adults: similarities, own-age accentuation, and older adult positivity effects.

UNLABELLED: BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: Two well-documented phenomena in person perception are the attractiveness halo effect (more positive impressions of more attractive people), and the babyface stereotype (more childlike impressions of more babyfaced people), shown by children, young adults (YA), and people from diverse cultures. This is the first study to systematically investigate these face stereotypes in older adults (OA) and to compare effects for younger and older adult faces. METHODS: YA and OA judges rated competence, health, hostility, untrustworthiness, attractiveness, and babyfaceness of older and younger neutral expression faces. Multilevel modeling assessed effects of rater age and face age on appearance stereotypes. RESULTS: Like YA, OA showed both the attractiveness halo effect and the babyface stereotype. However, OA showed weaker effects of attractiveness on impressions of untrustworthiness, and only OA associated higher babyfaceness with greater competence. There also was own-age accentuation, with both OA and YA showing stronger face stereotypes for faces closer to their own age. Age differences in the strength of the stereotypes reflected an OA positivity effect shown in more influence of positive facial qualities on impressions or less influence of negative ones, rather than vice versa. CONCLUSION: OA own-age biases, previously shown in emotion, age, and identity recognition, and OA positivity effects, previously revealed in attention, memory, and social judgments, also influence age differences in the strength and content of appearance stereotypes. Future research should assess implications of these results for age-related differences in susceptibility to appearance biases that YA have shown in socially significant domains, such as judicial and personnel decisions.

The reward of a good joke: neural correlates of viewing dynamic displays of stand-up comedy.

Humor is enjoyable, yet few studies to date have reported that humor engages brain regions involved in reward processing (i.e., the mesolimbic reward system). Even fewer have investigated socially relevant, dynamic displays of real actors telling jokes. Instead, many studies have focused on responses to static cartoons or written jokes in isolation. In the present investigation, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activation in response to video clips of comedians performing stand-up comedy, a more socially relevant task than reading jokes or cartoons in isolation. Participants watched video clips of eight stand-up comedians, half female/half male, that were prerated by a separate group of participants from the same population as eliciting either high or low levels of amusement, thereby allowing us to control for comedian attributes and comedic style. We found that high-funny clips elicited more activation in several brain regions involved with reward responses, including the nucleus accumbens, caudate, and putamen. A regression with participants' own ratings of humor revealed similar activity in reward areas as well as in regions involved in theory of mind. These findings indicate that dynamic social displays of humor do engage reward responses. The rewarding nature of humor may help explain why it is so valued socially.

Differentially tuned responses to restricted versus prolonged awareness of threat: a preliminary fMRI investigation.

Responses to threat occur via two known independent processing routes. We propose that early, reflexive processing is predominantly tuned to the detection of congruent combinations of facial cues that signal threat, whereas later, reflective processing is predominantly tuned to incongruent combinations of threat. To test this prediction, we examined responses to threat-gaze expression pairs (anger versus fear expression by direct versus averted gaze). We report on two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, one employing prolonged presentations (2s) of threat-gaze pairs to allow for reflective processing (Study 1), and one employing severely restricted (33 ms), backward masked presentations of threat-gaze pairs to isolate reflexive neural responding (Study 2). Our findings offer initial support for the conclusion that early, reflexive responses to threat are predominantly tuned to congruent threat-gaze pairings, whereas later reflective responses are predominantly tuned to ambiguous threat-gaze pairings. These findings highlight a distinct dual function in threat perception.

Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes: an fMRI investigation.

The ability to infer others' thoughts, intentions, and feelings is regarded as uniquely human. Over the last few decades, this remarkable ability has captivated the attention of philosophers, primatologists, clinical and developmental psychologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists. Most would agree that the capacity to reason about others' mental states is innately prepared, essential for successful human social interaction. Whether this ability is culturally tuned, however, remains entirely uncharted on both the behavioral and neural levels. Here we provide the first behavioral and neural evidence for an intracultural advantage (better performance for same- vs. other-culture) in mental state decoding in a sample of native Japanese and white American participants. We examined the neural correlates of this intracultural advantage using fMRI, revealing greater bilateral posterior superior temporal sulci recruitment during same- versus other-culture mental state decoding in both cultural groups. These findings offer preliminary support for cultural consistency in the neurological architecture subserving high-level mental state reasoning, as well as its differential recruitment based on cultural group membership.

The two sides of beauty: laterality and the duality of facial attractiveness.

We hypothesized that facial attractiveness represents a dual judgment, a combination of reward-based, sexual processes, and aesthetic, cognitive processes. Herein we describe a study that demonstrates that sexual and nonsexual processes both contribute to attractiveness judgments and that these processes can be dissociated. Female participants rated the general attractiveness of faces presented in either their left or right visual field. In order to examine sexual and nonsexual components of these judgments, general attractiveness ratings were correlated with ratings of these same faces made by two independent groups of raters in two specific contexts, one sexual and one nonsexual. Based on an items analysis, partial correlation coefficients were computed for each individual and used as the dependent variable of interest in a 2 (laterality: right, left) by 2 (context: sexual, nonsexual) ANOVA. This analysis revealed an interaction such that faces rated in a sexual context better predicted attractiveness ratings of faces shown in the left than right visual field, whereas faces rated in a nonsexual context better predicted attractiveness of faces shown in the right than left visual field. This finding is consistent with the assertion that sexual and nonsexual preferences involve predominantly lateralized processing routes that independently contribute to what is perceived to be attractive.

Reading the lines in the face: The contribution of angularity and roundness to perceptions of facial anger and joy.

Through 3 studies, we investigated whether angularity and roundness present in faces contributes to the perception of anger and joyful expressions, respectively. First, in Study 1 we found that angry expressions naturally contain more inward-pointing lines, whereas joyful expressions contain more outward-pointing lines. Then, using image-processing techniques in Studies 2 and 3, we filtered images to contain only inward-pointing or outward-pointing lines as a way to approximate angularity and roundness. We found that filtering images to be more angular increased how threatening and angry a neutral face was rated, increased how intense angry expressions were rated, and enhanced the recognition of anger. Conversely, filtering images to be rounder increased how warm and joyful a neutral face was rated, increased the intensity of joyful expressions, and enhanced recognition of joy. Together these findings show that angularity and roundness play a direct role in the recognition of angry and joyful expressions. Given evidence that angularity and roundness may play a biological role in indicating threat and safety in the environment, this suggests that angularity and roundness represent primitive facial cues used to signal threat-anger and warmth-joy pairings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The influence of political candidates' facial appearance on older and younger adults' voting choices and actual electoral success.

Younger adults (YA) judgments of political candidates' competence from facial appearance accurately predict electoral success. Whether this is true for older adults (OA) has not been investigated despite the fact that OA are more likely to vote than YA and may respond differently to particular facial qualities. We examined whether OA and YA ratings of competence, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and babyfaceness of opposing candidates in US Senate elections independently predicted their own vote choices and actual election outcomes. OA and YA ratings of attractiveness, competence, and trustworthiness positively predicted their choices, but the effect of competence was weaker for OA. Babyfaceness negatively predicted OA, but not YA, choices. OA and YA competence ratings equally predicted the actual election winners, while OA, but not YA, attractiveness ratings did so. Trustworthy and babyface ratings did not predict actual winners. These findings have implications for understanding age differences in candidate preferences and the prediction of election outcomes.

Age Differences in the Differentiation of Trait Impressions From Faces.

OBJECTIVES: We investigated whether evidence that older adults (OA) show less differentiation of visual stimuli than younger adults (YA) extends to trait impressions from faces and effects of face age. We also examined whether age differences in mood, vision, or cognition-mediated differentiation differences. Finally, we investigated whether age differences in trait differentiation mediated differences in impression positivity. METHOD: We used a differentiation index adapted from previous work on stereotyping to assess OA and YA likelihood of assigning different faces to different levels on trait scales. We computed scores for ratings of older and younger faces' competence, health, hostility, and untrustworthiness. RESULTS: OA showed less differentiated trait ratings than YA. Measures of mood, vision, and cognition did not mediate these rater age differences. Hostility was differentiated more for younger than older faces, while health was differentiated more for older faces, but only by OA. Age differences in differentiation mediated age differences in impression positivity. DISCUSSION: Less differentiation of trait impressions from faces in OA is consistent with previous evidence for less differentiation in face and emotion recognition. Results indicated that that age-related dedifferentiation does not reflect narrow changes in visual function. They also provide a novel explanation for OA positivity effects.

Ailing voters advance attractive congressional candidates.

Among many benefits of facial attractiveness, there is evidence that more attractive politicians are more likely to be elected. Recent research found this effect to be most pronounced in congressional districts with high disease threat-a result attributed to an adaptive disease avoidance mechanism, whereby the association of low attractiveness with poor health is particularly worrisome to voters who feel vulnerable to disease. We provided a more direct test of this explanation by examining the effects of individuals' own health and age. Supporting a disease avoidance mechanism, less healthy participants showed a stronger preference for more attractive contenders in U.S. Senate races than their healthier peers, and this effect was stronger for older participants, who were generally less healthy than younger participants. Stronger effects of health for older participants partly reflected the absence of positive bias toward attractive candidates among the healthiest, suggesting that healthy older adults may be unconcerned about disease threat or sufficiently wise to ignore attractiveness.

Age similarities in recognizing threat from faces and diagnostic cues.

BACKGROUND: Previous research indicates that younger adults (YA) can identify men's tendency to be aggressive based merely on their neutral expression faces. We compared older adults (OA) and YA accuracy and investigated contributing facial cues. METHOD: In Study 1, YA and OA rated the aggressiveness of young men depicted in facial photographs in a control, distraction, or accuracy motivation condition. In Study 2, YA and OA rated how angry, attractive, masculine, and babyfaced the men looked in addition to rating their aggressiveness. These measures plus measured facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) were used to examine cues to aggressiveness. RESULTS: Accuracy coefficients, calculated by correlating rated aggressiveness with the men's previously measured actual aggressiveness, were significant and equal for OA and YA. Accuracy was not moderated by distraction or accuracy motivation, suggesting automatic processing. A greater FWHR, lower attractiveness, and higher masculinity independently influenced rated aggressiveness by both age groups and also were valid cues to actual aggressiveness. DISCUSSION: Despite previous evidence for positivity biases in OA, they can be just as accurate as YA when it comes to discerning actual differences in the aggressiveness of young men.

Older and younger adults' accuracy in discerning health and competence in older and younger faces.

We examined older and younger adults' accuracy judging the health and competence of faces. Accuracy differed significantly from chance and varied with face age but not rater age. Health ratings were more accurate for older than younger faces, with the reverse for competence ratings. Accuracy was greater for low attractive younger faces, but not for low attractive older faces. Greater accuracy judging older faces' health was paralleled by greater validity of attractiveness and looking older as predictors of their health. Greater accuracy judging younger faces' competence was paralleled by greater validity of attractiveness and a positive expression as predictors of their competence. Although the ability to recognize variations in health and cognitive ability is preserved in older adulthood, the effects of face age on accuracy and the different effects of attractiveness across face age may alter social interactions across the life span.

Older Adults' Trait Impressions of Faces Are Sensitive to Subtle Resemblance to Emotions.

Younger adults (YA) attribute emotion-related traits to people whose neutral facial structure resembles an emotion (emotion overgeneralization). The fact that older adults (OA) show deficits in accurately labeling basic emotions suggests that they may be relatively insensitive to variations in the emotion resemblance of neutral expression faces that underlie emotion overgeneralization effects. On the other hand, the fact that OA, like YA, show a 'pop-out' effect for anger, more quickly locating an angry than a happy face in a neutral array, suggests that both age groups may be equally sensitive to emotion resemblance. We used computer modeling to assess the degree to which neutral faces objectively resembled emotions and assessed whether that resemblance predicted trait impressions. We found that both OA and YA showed anger and surprise overgeneralization in ratings of danger and naiveté, respectively, with no significant differences in the strength of the effects for the two age groups. These findings suggest that well-documented OA deficits on emotion recognition tasks may be more due to processing demands than to an insensitivity to the social affordances of emotion expressions.

Older and younger adults' first impressions from faces: similar in agreement but different in positivity.

People readily form first impressions from faces, with consensual judgments that have significant social consequences. Similar impressions are shown by children, young adults (YA), and people from diverse cultures. However, this is the first study to systematically investigate older adults' (OA) impressions. OA and YA showed similar levels of within-age agreement in their impressions of competence, health, hostility, and trustworthiness. Both groups also showed stronger within- than between-age agreement. Consistent with other evidence for age-related increases in positivity, OA showed more positive impressions of the health, hostility, and trustworthiness of faces. These effects tended to be strongest for the most negatively valenced faces, suggesting that they derive from OA lesser processing of negative cues rather than greater processing of positive cues. An own-age bias in impressions was limited to greater OA positivity in impressions of the hostility of older faces, but not younger ones. Although OA and YA differed in vision and executive function, only OA slower processing speed contributed to age differences in impression positivity. Positivity effects in OA have not been previously linked to processing speed, and research investigating possible explanations for this effect would be worthwhile.

Neural responses to perceiving suffering in humans and animals.

The human ability to perceive and understand others' suffering is critical to reinforcing and maintaining our social bonds. What is not clear, however, is the extent to which this generalizes to nonhuman entities. Anecdotal evidence indicates that people may engage in empathy-like processes when observing suffering nonhuman entities, but psychological research suggests that we more readily empathize with those to whom we are closer and more similar. In this research, we examined neural responses in participants while they were presented with pictures of human versus dog suffering. We found that viewing human and animal suffering led to large overlapping regions of activation previously implicated in empathic responding to suffering, including the anterior cingulate gyrus and anterior insula. Direct comparisons of viewing human and animal suffering also revealed differences such that human suffering yielded significantly greater medial prefrontal activation, consistent with high-level theory of mind, whereas animal suffering yielded significantly greater parietal and inferior frontal activation, consistent with more semantic evaluation and perceptual simulation.

Amygdala responses to averted vs direct gaze fear vary as a function of presentation speed.

We examined whether amygdala responses to rapidly presented fear expressions are preferentially tuned to averted vs direct gaze fear and conversely whether responses to more sustained presentations are preferentially tuned to direct vs averted gaze fear. We conducted three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies to test these predictions including: Study 1: a block design employing sustained presentations (1 s) of averted vs direct gaze fear expressions taken from the Pictures of Facial Affect; Study 2: a block design employing rapid presentations (300 ms) of these same stimuli and Study 3: a direct replication of these studies in the context of a single experiment using stimuli selected from the NimStim Emotional Face Stimuli. Together, these studies provide evidence consistent with an early, reflexive amygdala response tuned to clear threat and a later reflective response tuned to ambiguous threat.

I feel your pain: emotional closeness modulates neural responses to empathically experienced rejection.

Empathy is generally thought of as the ability to share the emotional experiences of others. In scientific terms, this is usually operationalized as an ability to vicariously feel others' mental and emotional experiences. Supporting this account, research demonstrates that watching others experience physical pain activates similar brain regions to the actual experience of pain itself. First-hand experience of social rejection also activates this network. The current work extends these findings by examining whether the "pain" network is similarly implicated in witnessing rejection, and whether emotional closeness modulates this response. We provide evidence for each of these suppositions, demonstrating: (a) that the pain network is activated when watching a friend suffer social rejection, and (b) that interpersonal closeness with that friend modulates this response. Further, we found that the inferior frontal gyrus, critical for representing others' mental and emotional states, mediates the relationship between emotional closeness and neural responses to watching the rejection of a friend.

Culture, gaze and the neural processing of fear expressions.

The direction of others' eye gaze has important influences on how we perceive their emotional expressions. Here, we examined differences in neural activation to direct- versus averted-gaze fear faces as a function of culture of the participant (Japanese versus US Caucasian), culture of the stimulus face (Japanese versus US Caucasian), and the relation between the two. We employed a previously validated paradigm to examine differences in neural activation in response to rapidly presented direct- versus averted-fear expressions, finding clear evidence for a culturally determined role of gaze in the processing of fear. Greater neural responsivity was apparent to averted- versus direct-gaze fear in several regions related to face and emotion processing, including bilateral amygdalae, when posed on same-culture faces, whereas greater response to direct- versus averted-gaze fear was apparent in these same regions when posed on other-culture faces. We also found preliminary evidence for intercultural variation including differential responses across participants to Japanese versus US Caucasian stimuli, and to a lesser degree differences in how Japanese and US Caucasian participants responded to these stimuli. These findings reveal a meaningful role of culture in the processing of eye gaze and emotion, and highlight their interactive influences in neural processing.