Decline or improvement?

Changes in Computer-Analyzed Facial Expressions with Age

Facial expressions are well known to change with age, but the quantitative properties of facial aging remain unclear. In the present study, we investigated the differences in the intensity of facial expressions between older (n = 56) and younger adults (n = 113). In laboratory experiments, the posed facial expressions of the participants were obtained based on six basic emotions and neutral facial expression stimuli, and the intensities of their faces were analyzed using a computer vision tool, OpenFace software. Our results showed that the older adults expressed strong expressions for some negative emotions and neutral faces. Furthermore, when making facial expressions, older adults used more face muscles than younger adults across the emotions. These results may help to understand the characteristics of facial expressions in aging and can provide empirical evidence for other fields regarding facial recognition.

Decline in Emotional Face Recognition Among Elderly People May Reflect Mild Cognitive Impairment

Background

As with cognitive function, the ability to recognize emotions changes with age. In the literature regarding the relationship between recognition of emotion and cognitive function during aging, the effects of predictors such as aging, emotional state, and cognitive domains on emotion recognition are unclear. This study was performed to clarify the cognitive functions underlying recognition of emotional facial expressions, and to evaluate the effects of depressive mood on recognition of emotion in elderly subjects, as well as to reproduce the effects of aging on the recognition of emotional facial expressions.

Materials and Methods

A total of 26 young (mean age = 20.9 years) and 30 elderly subjects (71.6 years) participated in the study. All subjects participated in face perception, face matching, emotion matching, and emotion selection tasks. In addition, elderly subjects were administered a multicomponent cognitive test: the Neurobehavioral Cognitive Status Examination (Cognistat) and the Geriatric Depression Scale-Short Version. We analyzed these factors using multiple linear regression.

Results

There were no significant differences between the two groups in the face perception task, but in the face matching, emotion matching, and emotion selection tasks, elderly subjects showed significantly poorer performance. Among elderly subjects, multiple regression analyses showed that performance on the emotion matching task was predicted by age, emotional status, and cognitive function, but paradoxical relationships were observed between recognition of emotional faces and some verbal functions. In addition, 47% of elderly participants showed cognitive decline in one or more domains, although all of them had total Cognistat scores above the cutoff.

Conclusion

It might be crucial to consider preclinical pathological changes such as mild cognitive impairment when testing for age effects in elderly populations.

Perceiving dynamic emotions expressed simultaneously in the face and body minimizes perceptual differences between young and older adults

OBJECTIVES

It is commonly argued that older adults show difficulties in standardized tasks of emotional expression perception, yet most previous works relied on classic sets of static, decontextualized, and stereotypical facial expressions. In real-life, facial expressions are dynamic and embedded in a rich context, two key factors that may aid emotion perception. Specifically, body language provides important affective cues that may disambiguate facial movements.

METHOD

We compared emotion perception of dynamic faces, bodies, and their combination, in a sample of older (age 60-83, n=126) and young (age 18-30, n=124) adults. We used the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayals (GEMEP) set, which includes a full view of expressers' faces and bodies, displaying a diverse range of positive and negative emotions, portrayed dynamically and holistically in a non-stereotypical, unconstrained manner. Critically, we digitally manipulated the dynamic cue such that perceivers viewed isolated faces (without bodies), isolated bodies (without faces), or faces with bodies.

RESULTS

Older adults showed better perception of positive and negative dynamic facial expressions, while young adults showed better perception of positive isolated dynamic bodily expressions. Importantly, emotion perception of faces with bodies was comparable across ages.

DISCUSSION

Dynamic emotion perception in young and older adults may be more similar than previously assumed, especially when the task is more realistic and ecological. Our results emphasize the importance of contextualized and ecological tasks in emotion perception across ages.

The influence of mouth opening and closing degrees on processing in NimStim facial expressions: An ERP study from Chinese college students

The degree of mouth opening and closing is one of the most important attributes of expression, reflecting the intensity of facial expression and can assist people to recognize the expression more accurately. The NimStim set of facial expressions contains the open and closed expression pictures of the same actor. Although this expression set has been widely used, there is little research on the intensity effect of this set. In this study, 32 Chinese college students were recruited in to view the pictures passively in an ERP experiment, aiming to investigate the intensity effect in the NimStim set (mouth open, mouth closed) of anger, disgust, sad, happy and neutral expression in electrical physiological aspects of the reaction. Our results reported that intensity of expression early affected in VPP and mainly affected in LPP with the open mouth having a larger activity. And there was no intensity effect found in P1, N170 and EPN. Notably, culture and social environment may influence the intensity effect of different emotions. In future, researchers should use methods that ensure subjects pay more attention to the intensity effect of the NimStim facial set.

The mechanism of inhibitory control on the development of theory of mind in old age-based on the two-component model of psychological theory

OBJECTIVE

Based on the two-component model of theory of mind, the current study explored the cognitive and emotional theory of mind of the elderly by using false-belief pictures and eye-reading tasks respectively, and examined effects of inhibitory control on elderly adults' cognitive and emotional theory of mind.

METHOD

One-hundred twelve elderly participants were randomly recruited, and the control task, cognitive theory of mind, emotional theory of mind and the Stroop task were used.

RESULTS

The results showed the following: (1) Elderly adults' theory of mind decreased compared with that of young people; specifically, cognitive theory of mind showed an aging trend (aged above 75 years), while emotional theory of mind developed at a relatively gentle speed during old age; (2) Compared with young people, the inhibitory control of the elderly gently declined among those aged above 75 years; (3) Inhibitory control partially mediated the relationship between age and cognitive theory of mind.

CONCLUSION

The cognitive and emotional components of theory of mind in the elderly were distinct. It was difficult for the elderly to complete psychological tasks related to social cognition that required high inhibitory control; however, they could complete psychological tasks that did not require high inhibitory control.

Effects of age and mood on emotional face processing differ depending on the intensity of the facial expression

Research suggests that mood can moderate age differences in recognizing facial emotion. In this study, we examined how an anxious versus calm mood state affected younger and older adults' processing of emotional faces. Older adults had greater difficulty identifying negative emotions, particularly when emotions were displayed at a low intensity level. However, an anxious mood did not affect age differences in emotional face recognition. In contrast, age, emotional intensity, and current mood state all affected the perceived intensity of emotion. The effects of age and mood on perceived emotional intensity were only observed for low intensity facial expressions. When induced into an anxious mood, younger adults perceived threatening emotions (i.e., fear, anger) as more emotionally intense, whereas older adults perceived anger and happiness to be more intense. These findings emphasize the need to consider both internal and external factors when investigating the effects of age on emotional face processing.

Effects of Age and Hearing Loss on the Recognition of Emotions in Speech

OBJECTIVES

Emotional communication is a cornerstone of social cognition and informs human interaction. Previous studies have shown deficits in facial and vocal emotion recognition in older adults, particularly for negative emotions. However, few studies have examined combined effects of aging and hearing loss on vocal emotion recognition by adults. The objective of this study was to compare vocal emotion recognition in adults with hearing loss relative to age-matched peers with normal hearing. We hypothesized that age would play a role in emotion recognition and that listeners with hearing loss would show deficits across the age range.

DESIGN

Thirty-two adults (22 to 74 years of age) with mild to severe, symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss, amplified with bilateral hearing aids and 30 adults (21 to 75 years of age) with normal hearing, participated in the study. Stimuli consisted of sentences spoken by 2 talkers, 1 male, 1 female, in 5 emotions (angry, happy, neutral, sad, and scared) in an adult-directed manner. The task involved a single-interval, five-alternative forced-choice paradigm, in which the participants listened to individual sentences and indicated which of the five emotions was targeted in each sentence. Reaction time was recorded as an indirect measure of cognitive load.

RESULTS

Results showed significant effects of age. Older listeners had reduced accuracy, increased reaction times, and reduced d' values. Normal hearing listeners showed an Age by Talker interaction where older listeners had more difficulty identifying male vocal emotion. Listeners with hearing loss showed reduced accuracy, increased reaction times, and lower d' values compared with age-matched normal-hearing listeners. Within the group with hearing loss, age and talker effects were significant, and low-frequency pure-tone averages showed a marginally significant effect. Contrary to other studies, once hearing thresholds were taken into account, no effects of listener sex were observed, nor were there effects of individual emotions on accuracy. However, reaction times and d' values showed significant differences between individual emotions.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this study confirm existing findings in the literature showing that older adults show significant deficits in voice emotion recognition compared with their normally hearing peers, and that among listeners with normal hearing, age-related changes in hearing do not predict this age-related deficit. The present results also add to the literature by showing that hearing impairment contributes additionally to deficits in vocal emotion recognition, separate from deficits related to age. These effects of age and hearing loss appear to be quite robust, being evident in reduced accuracy scores and d' measures, as well as in reaction time measures.

Older adults detect happy facial expressions less rapidly

Previous experimental psychology studies based on visual search paradigms have reported that young adults detect emotional facial expressions more rapidly than emotionally neutral expressions. However, it remains unclear whether this holds in older adults. We investigated this by comparing the abilities of young and older adults to detect emotional and neutral facial expressions while controlling the visual properties of faces presented (termed anti-expressions) in a visual search task. Both age groups detected normal angry faces more rapidly than anti-angry faces. However, whereas young adults detected normal happy faces more rapidly than anti-happy faces, older adults did not. This suggests that older adults may not be easy to detect or focusing attention towards smiling faces appearing peripherally.

No effect of age on emotion recognition after accounting for cognitive factors and depression

A decline in emotion recognition ability across the lifespan has been well documented. However, whether age predicts emotion recognition difficulties after accounting for potentially confounding factors which covary with age remains unclear. Although previous research suggested that age-related decline in emotion recognition ability may be partly a consequence of cognitive (fluid intelligence, processing speed) and affective (e.g., depression) factors, recent theories highlight a potential role for alexithymia (difficulty identifying and describing one’s emotions) and interoception (perception of the body’s internal state). This study therefore aimed to examine the recognition of anger and disgust across the adult lifespan in a group of 140 20–90-year-olds to see whether an effect of age would remain after controlling for a number of cognitive and affective factors potentially impacted by age. In addition, using an identity recognition control task, the study aimed to determine whether the factors accounting for the effects of age on emotion discrimination also contribute towards generalised face processing difficulties. Results revealed that discrimination of disgust and anger across the lifespan was predicted by processing speed and fluid intelligence, and negatively by depression. No effect of age was found after these factors were accounted for. Importantly, these effects were specific to emotion discrimination; only crystallised intelligence accounted for unique variance in identity discrimination. Contrary to expectations, although interoception and alexithymia were correlated with emotion discrimination abilities, these factors did not explain unique variance after accounting for other variables.

A meta-analysis of the relationship between emotion recognition ability and intelligence

The ability to recognise others' emotions from nonverbal cues (emotion recognition ability, ERA) is measured with performance-based tests and has many positive correlates. Although researchers have long proposed that ERA is related to general mental ability or intelligence, a comprehensive analysis of this relationship is lacking. For instance, it remains unknown whether the magnitude of the association varies by intelligence type, ERA test features, as well as demographic variables. The present meta-analysis examined the relationship between ERA and intelligence based on 471 effect sizes from 133 samples and found a significant mean effect size (controlled for nesting within samples) of r = .19. Different intelligence types (crystallized, fluid, spatial, memory, information processing speed and efficiency) yielded similar effect sizes, whereas academic achievement measures (e.g. SAT scores) were unrelated to ERA. Effect sizes were higher for ERA tests that simultaneously present facial, vocal, and bodily cues (as compared to tests using static pictures) and for tests with higher reliability and more emotions. Results were unaffected by most study and sample characteristics, but effect size increased with higher mean age of the sample. These findings establish ERA as sensory-cognitive ability that is distinct from, yet related to, intelligence.

Automatic and Controlled Emotion Regulation in Aging: The Case of Expressive Suppression

Background/Study Context: To explain the high levels of well-being reported by older adults, socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that emotion regulation becomes more automated with age. Hence, the objective of the present study was to determine whether automatic emotion regulation becomes indeed more efficient with age, as controlled regulation becomes less efficient. We tested this hypothesis with regard to a specific emotion regulation strategy, expressive suppression, and a discrete emotion: disgust.

METHODS

Disgusting videos were presented to 74 young adults (mean (SD) age: 20.1 (1.8)) and 52 older adults (mean (SD) age: 73.6 (9.3)), randomly assigned to one of three conditions: the control condition, the implicit condition (assessing automatic suppression), and the explicit condition (assessing controlled suppression). The disgust expressed and the disgust felt were analyzed separately with factorial analyses of variance that included age group and regulation condition as between-subject variables.

RESULTS

Our results suggest that automatic and controlled expressive suppression may both be altered in healthy aging. Relative to young adults, older adults do not suppress their facial expressions as much but report feeling less disgust.

CONCLUSION

Expressive suppression may not become more automated with age. However, the older adults' ability to suppress facial expressions did not appear to be directly associated with the intensity of their emotions.

East Asian Young and Older Adult Perceptions of Emotional Faces From an Age- and Sex-Fair East Asian Facial Expression Database

There is increasing interest in clarifying how different face emotion expressions are perceived by people from different cultures, of different ages and sex. However, scant availability of well-controlled emotional face stimuli from non-Western populations limit the evaluation of cultural differences in face emotion perception and how this might be modulated by age and sex differences. We present a database of East Asian face expression stimuli, enacted by young and older, male and female, Taiwanese using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Combined with a prior database, this present database consists of 90 identities with happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised and neutral expressions amounting to 628 photographs. Twenty young and 24 older East Asian raters scored the photographs for intensities of multiple-dimensions of emotions and induced affect. Multivariate analyses characterized the dimensionality of perceived emotions and quantified effects of age and sex. We also applied commercial software to extract computer-based metrics of emotions in photographs. Taiwanese raters perceived happy faces as one category, sad, angry, and disgusted expressions as one category, and fearful and surprised expressions as one category. Younger females were more sensitive to face emotions than younger males. Whereas, older males showed reduced face emotion sensitivity, older female sensitivity was similar or accentuated relative to young females. Commercial software dissociated six emotions according to the FACS demonstrating that defining visual features were present. Our findings show that East Asians perceive a different dimensionality of emotions than Western-based definitions in face recognition software, regardless of age and sex. Critically, stimuli with detailed cultural norms are indispensable in interpreting neural and behavioral responses involving human facial expression processing. To this end, we add to the tools, which are available upon request, for conducting such research.

Development of the Youth Emotion Picture Set

Several facial expression image sets have been developed. Nevertheless, there is a lack of facial expression sets comprising adolescents’ images depicting all basic emotions. This study aimed to fill this gap through the development of an image database of youth facial expressions, containing pictures of six basic emotions plus neutral. Posed and spontaneous expressions were collected from 31 youths, 12 to 20 years old; 2,279 frames were obtained, and an initial screening was conducted through the exclusion of similar frames, low intensity images, and ambiguous or blended expressions; 256 frames met criteria and were rechecked by two expert judges. Images were retained if they depicted all the prototypical features of the designated expression. A final selection was conducted to assure an image set that covered all age ranges, both sexes and an even number of images by expression, resulting in 42 frames (21 male, six of each emotion). Expert judges, independent adults, independent teenagers, and a software validation were used to assure database validity. Agreement across raters was high, and no differences were observed for posed and spontaneous images. The data set developed in this study can be a valid tool in studies of facial expressions, in particular, with adolescents’ samples.

The Curvilinear Relationship between Age and Emotional Aperture: The Moderating Role of Agreeableness

The capability to correctly recognize collective emotion expressions [i.e., emotional aperture (EA)] is crucial for effective social and work-related interactions. Yet, little remains known about the antecedents of this ability. The present study therefore aims to shed new light onto key aspects that may promote or diminish an individual’s EA. We examine the role of age for this ability in an online sample of 181 participants (with an age range of 18–72 years, located in Germany), and we investigate agreeableness as a key contingency factor. Among individuals with lower agreeableness, on the one hand, our results indicate a curvilinear relationship between age and EA, such that EA remains at a relatively high level until these individuals’ middle adulthood (with a slight increase until their late 30s) and declines afterward. Individuals with higher agreeableness, on the other hand, exhibit relatively high EA irrespective of their age. Together, these findings offer new insights for the emerging literature on EA, illustrating that specific demographic and personality characteristics may jointly shape such collective emotion recognition.

Reconhecimento de Emoções Faciais no Envelhecimento: Uma Revisão Sistemática

No processo de envelhecimento, alterações na percepção e na cognição podem gerar prejuízos no reconhecimento de emoções faciais. No presente trabalho, foi realizada uma revisão sistemática, de acordo com as diretrizes do PRISMA, de estudos recentes que avaliaram a percepção e o reconhecimento facial de emoções em idosos sem patologias. As bases eletrônicas de dados pesquisadas foram: MEDLINE, PsycoINFO e Web of Science, sendo selecionados 22 artigos publicados entre 2009 e 2016. De um modo geral, verificou-se que os idosos apresentaram um declínio no reconhecimento de emoções, principalmente para as emoções negativas. Tais resultados podem ser explicados tanto pela teoria estrutural, quanto pela teoria da seletividade socioemocional. Os resultados têm importantes implicações na medida em que sinalizam a relevância da avaliação cognitiva e do uso de estímulos mais ecológicos nas tarefas de reconhecimento emocional em idosos.

Gaze Behavior Consistency among Older and Younger Adults When Looking at Emotional Faces

The identification of non-verbal emotional signals, and especially of facial expressions, is essential for successful social communication among humans. Previous research has reported an age-related decline in facial emotion identification, and argued for socio-emotional or aging-brain model explanations. However, more perceptual differences in the gaze strategies that accompany facial emotional processing with advancing age have been under-explored yet. In this study, 22 young (22.2 years) and 22 older (70.4 years) adults were instructed to look at basic facial expressions while their gaze movements were recorded by an eye-tracker. Participants were then asked to identify each emotion, and the unbiased hit rate was applied as performance measure. Gaze data were first analyzed using traditional measures of fixations over two preferential regions of the face (upper and lower areas) for each emotion. Then, to better capture core gaze changes with advancing age, spatio-temporal gaze behaviors were deeper examined using data-driven analysis (dimension reduction, clustering). Results first confirmed that older adults performed worse than younger adults at identifying facial expressions, except for "joy" and "disgust," and this was accompanied by a gaze preference toward the lower-face. Interestingly, this phenomenon was maintained during the whole time course of stimulus presentation. More importantly, trials corresponding to older adults were more tightly clustered, suggesting that the gaze behavior patterns of older adults are more consistent than those of younger adults. This study demonstrates that, confronted to emotional faces, younger and older adults do not prioritize or ignore the same facial areas. Older adults mainly adopted a focused-gaze strategy, consisting in focusing only on the lower part of the face throughout the whole stimuli display time. This consistency may constitute a robust and distinctive "social signature" of emotional identification in aging. Younger adults, however, were more dispersed in terms of gaze behavior and used a more exploratory-gaze strategy, consisting in repeatedly visiting both facial areas.

Age-Related Changes in the Processing of Emotional Faces in a Dual-Task Paradigm

Background/ Study Context: Age-related changes appear to affect the ability to identify emotional facial expressions in dual-task conditions (i.e., while simultaneously performing a second visual task). The level of interference generated by the secondary task depends on the phase of emotional processing affected by the interference and the nature of the secondary task. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of these variables on age-related changes in the processing of emotional faces.

METHODS

The identification of emotional facial expressions (EFEs) was assessed in a dual-task paradigm using the following variables: (a) the phase during which interference was applied (encoding vs. retrieval phase); and (b) the nature of the interfering stimulus (visuospatial vs. verbal). The sample population consisted of 24 healthy aged adults (mean age = 75.38) and 40 younger adults (mean age = 26.90). The accuracy of EFE identification was calculated for all experimental conditions.

RESULTS

Consistent with our hypothesis, the performance of the older group was poorer than that of the younger group in all experimental conditions. Dual-task performance was poorer when the interference occurred during the encoding phase of emotional face processing and when both tasks were of the same nature (i.e., when the experimental condition was more demanding in terms of attention).

CONCLUSIONS

These results provide empirical evidence of age-related deficits in the identification of emotional facial expressions, which may be partially explained by the impairment of cognitive resources specific to this task. These findings may account for the difficulties experienced by the elderly during social interactions that require the concomitant processing of emotional and environmental information.

The combined effect of sleep and time of day on emotion decoding from dynamic visual cues in older adults

It is well known that night sleep is a decisive factor for the effective functioning of the human body and mind. In addition to the role of sleep, older adults report that they are "morning types" and that their cognitive and emotional abilities seem to be at a higher level in the morning hours. In this vein, this study is aimed at examining the effect of sleep combined with the "time of day" condition on a specific ability that is crucial for interpersonal communication, namely, emotion recognition, in older adults. Specifically, the study compared older adults' performance in decoding emotions from ecologically valid, dynamic visual cues, in two conditions: "early in the morning and after night sleep", and "in the afternoon and after many hours since night sleep". An emotion recognition task was administered twice to 37 community-dwelling older adults. The results showed a statistically significant higher performance in the morning in decoding all emotions presented, compared to the afternoon condition. Pleasant surprise, sadness, and anxiety were revealed as the most difficult emotions to be recognized in the afternoon condition.

Age-Related Response Bias in the Decoding of Sad Facial Expressions

Recent studies have found that age is negatively associated with the accuracy of decoding emotional facial expressions; this effect of age was found for actors as well as for raters. Given that motivational differences and stereotypes may bias the attribution of emotion, the aim of the present study was to explore whether these age effects are due to response bias, that is, the unbalanced use of response categories. Thirty younger raters (19-30 years) and thirty older raters (65-81 years) viewed video clips of younger and older actors representing the same age ranges, and decoded their facial expressions. We computed both raw hit rates and bias-corrected hit rates to assess the influence of potential age-related response bias on decoding accuracy. Whereas raw hit rates indicated significant effects of both the actors' and the raters' ages on decoding accuracy for sadness, these age effects were no longer significant when response bias was corrected. Our results suggest that age effects on the accuracy of decoding facial expressions may be due, at least in part, to age-related response bias.

Skilful communication: Emotional facial expressions recognition in very old adults

OBJECTIVES

The main objective of this study was to assess the changes associated with ageing in the ability to identify emotional facial expressions and to what extent such age-related changes depend on the intensity with which each basic emotion is manifested.

METHODS

A randomised controlled trial carried out on 107 subjects who performed a six alternative forced-choice emotional expressions identification task. The stimuli consisted of 270 virtual emotional faces expressing the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger and disgust) at three different levels of intensity (low, pronounced and maximum). The virtual faces were generated by facial surface changes, as described in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).

RESULTS

A progressive age-related decline in the ability to identify emotional facial expressions was detected. The ability to recognise the intensity of expressions was one of the most strongly impaired variables associated with age, although the valence of emotion was also poorly identified, particularly in terms of recognising negative emotions.

CONCLUSIONS

Nurses should be mindful of how ageing affects communication with older patients. In this study, very old adults displayed more difficulties in identifying emotional facial expressions, especially low intensity expressions and those associated with difficult emotions like disgust or fear.

"Now I see it, now I don't": Determining Threshold Levels of Facial Emotion Recognition for Use in Patient Populations

The importance of including measures of emotion processing, such as tests of facial emotion recognition (FER), as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment is being increasingly recognized. In clinical settings, FER tests need to be sensitive, short, and easy to administer, given the limited time available and patient limitations. Current tests, however, commonly use stimuli that either display prototypical emotions, bearing the risk of ceiling effects and unequal task difficulty, or are cognitively too demanding and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations in FER testing in patient populations, we aimed to define FER threshold levels for the six basic emotions in healthy individuals. Forty-nine healthy individuals between 52 and 79 years of age were asked to identify the six basic emotions at different intensity levels (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, and 125% of the prototypical emotion). Analyses uncovered differing threshold levels across emotions and sex of facial stimuli, ranging from 50% up to 100% intensities. Using these findings as "healthy population benchmarks", we propose to apply these threshold levels to clinical populations either as facial emotion recognition or intensity rating tasks. As part of any comprehensive social cognition test battery, this approach should allow for a rapid and sensitive assessment of potential FER deficits.

Implicit affectivity and rapid processing of affective body language: An fMRI study

Previous research has revealed affect-congruity effects for the recognition of affects from faces. Little is known about the impact of affect on the perception of body language. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship of implicit (versus explicit) affectivity with the recognition of briefly presented affective body expressions. Implicit affectivity, which can be measured using indirect assessment methods, has been found to be more predictive of spontaneous physiological reactions than explicit (self-reported) affect. Thirty-four healthy women had to label the expression of body postures (angry, fearful, happy, or neutral) presented for 66 ms and masked by a neutral body posture in a forced-choice format while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants' implicit affectivity was assessed using the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test. Measures of explicit state and trait affectivity were also administered. Analysis of the fMRI data was focused on a subcortical network involved in the rapid perception of affective body expressions. Only implicit negative affect (but not explicit affect) was correlated with correct labeling performance for angry body posture. As expected, implicit negative affect was positively associated with activation of the subcortical network in response to fearful and angry expression (compared to neutral expression). Responses of the caudate nucleus to affective body expression were especially associated with its recognition. It appears that processes of rapid recognition of affects from body postures could be facilitated by an individual's implicit negative affect.

Facial emotion recognition impairments are associated with brain volume abnormalities in individuals with HIV

Impaired facial emotion recognition abilities in HIV+ patients are well documented, but little is known about the neural etiology of these difficulties. We examined the relation of facial emotion recognition abilities to regional brain volumes in 44 HIV-positive (HIV+) and 44 HIV-negative control (HC) adults. Volumes of structures implicated in HIV-associated neuropathology and emotion recognition were measured on MRI using an automated segmentation tool. Relative to HC, HIV+ patients demonstrated emotion recognition impairments for fearful expressions, reduced anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) volumes, and increased amygdala volumes. In the HIV+ group, fear recognition impairments correlated significantly with ACC, but not amygdala volumes. ACC reductions were also associated with lower nadir CD4 levels (i.e., greater HIV-disease severity). These findings extend our understanding of the neurobiological substrates underlying an essential social function, facial emotion recognition, in HIV+ individuals and implicate HIV-related ACC atrophy in the impairment of these abilities.

Younger and Older Users' Recognition of Virtual Agent Facial Expressions

As technology advances, robots and virtual agents will be introduced into the home and healthcare settings to assist individuals, both young and old, with everyday living tasks. Understanding how users recognize an agent's social cues is therefore imperative, especially in social interactions. Facial expression, in particular, is one of the most common non-verbal cues used to display and communicate emotion in on-screen agents (Cassell, Sullivan, Prevost, & Churchill, 2000). Age is important to consider because age-related differences in emotion recognition of human facial expression have been supported (Ruffman et al., 2008), with older adults showing a deficit for recognition of negative facial expressions. Previous work has shown that younger adults can effectively recognize facial emotions displayed by agents (Bartneck & Reichenbach, 2005; Courgeon et al. 2009; 2011; Breazeal, 2003); however, little research has compared in-depth younger and older adults' ability to label a virtual agent's facial emotions, an import consideration because social agents will be required to interact with users of varying ages. If such age-related differences exist for recognition of virtual agent facial expressions, we aim to understand if those age-related differences are influenced by the intensity of the emotion, dynamic formation of emotion (i.e., a neutral expression developing into an expression of emotion through motion), or the type of virtual character differing by human-likeness. Study 1 investigated the relationship between age-related differences, the implication of dynamic formation of emotion, and the role of emotion intensity in emotion recognition of the facial expressions of a virtual agent (iCat). Study 2 examined age-related differences in recognition expressed by three types of virtual characters differing by human-likeness (non-humanoid iCat, synthetic human, and human). Study 2 also investigated the role of configural and featural processing as a possible explanation for age-related differences in emotion recognition. First, our findings show age-related differences in the recognition of emotions expressed by a virtual agent, with older adults showing lower recognition for the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral. These age-related difference might be explained by older adults having difficulty discriminating similarity in configural arrangement of facial features for certain emotions; for example, older adults often mislabeled the similar emotions of fear as surprise. Second, our results did not provide evidence for the dynamic formation improving emotion recognition; but, in general, the intensity of the emotion improved recognition. Lastly, we learned that emotion recognition, for older and younger adults, differed by character type, from best to worst: human, synthetic human, and then iCat. Our findings provide guidance for design, as well as the development of a framework of age-related differences in emotion recognition.

Recognition of facial emotions and identity in patients with mesial temporal lobe and idiopathic generalized epilepsy: an eye-tracking study

PURPOSE

To describe visual scanning pattern for facial identity recognition (FIR) and emotion recognition (FER) in patients with idiopathic generalized (IGE) and mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). Secondary endpoint was to correlate the results with cognitive function.

METHODS

Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT) and Ekman&Friesen series were performed for FIR and FER respectively in 23 controls, 20 IGE and 19 MTLE patients. Eye movements were recorded by a Hi-Speed eye-tracker system. Neuropsychological tools explored cognitive function.

RESULTS

Correct FIR rate was 78% in controls, 70.7% in IGE and 67.4% (p=0.009) in MTLE patients. FER hits reached 82.7% in controls, 74.3% in IGE (p=0.006) and 73.4% in MTLE (p=0.002) groups. IGE patients failed in disgust (p=0.005) and MTLE ones in fear (p=0.009) and disgust (p=0.03). FER correlated with neuropsychological scores, particularly verbal fluency (r=0.542, p<0.001). Eye-tracking revealed that controls scanned faces more diffusely than IGE and MTLE patients for FIR, who tended to top facial areas. A longer scanning of the top facial area was found in the three groups for FER. Gap between top and bottom facial region fixation time decreased in MTLE patients, with more but shorter fixations in bottom facial region. However, none of these findings were statistically significant.

CONCLUSION

FIR was impaired in MTLE patients, and FER in both IGE and MTLE, particularly for fear and disgust. Although not statistically significant, those with impaired FER tended to perform more diffuse eye-tracking over the faces and have cognitive dysfunction.

A note on age differences in mood-congruent vs. mood-incongruent emotion processing in faces

THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES FOUR INTERRELATED RESEARCH QUESTIONS

(1) Does experienced mood affect emotion perception in faces and is this perception mood-congruent or mood-incongruent?(2) Are there age-group differences in the interplay between experienced mood and emotion perception? (3) Does emotion perception in faces change as a function of the temporal sequence of study sessions and stimuli presentation, and (4) does emotion perception in faces serve a mood-regulatory function? One hundred fifty-four adults of three different age groups (younger: 20-31 years; middle-aged: 44-55 years; older adults: 70-81 years) were asked to provide multidimensional emotion ratings of a total of 1026 face pictures of younger, middle-aged, and older men and women, each displaying six different prototypical (primary) emotional expressions. By analyzing the likelihood of ascribing an additional emotional expression to a face whose primary emotion had been correctly recognized, the multidimensional rating approach permits the study of emotion perception while controlling for emotion recognition. Following up on previous research on mood responses to recurring unpleasant situations using the same dataset (Voelkle et al., 2013), crossed random effects analyses supported a mood-congruent relationship between experienced mood and perceived emotions in faces. In particular older adults were more likely to perceive happiness in faces when being in a positive mood and less likely to do so when being in a negative mood. This did not apply to younger adults. Temporal sequence of study sessions and stimuli presentation had a strong effect on the likelihood of ascribing an additional emotional expression. In contrast to previous findings, however, there was neither evidence for a change from mood-congruent to mood-incongruent responses over time nor evidence for a mood-regulatory effect.

Interactions between Identity and Emotional Expression in Face Processing across the Lifespan: Evidence from Redundancy Gains

We tested how aging affects the integration of visual information from faces. Three groups of participants aged 20–30, 40–50, and 60–70 performed a divided attention task in which they had to detect the presence of a target facial identity or a target facial expression. Three target stimuli were used: (1) with the target identity but not the target expression, (2) with the target expression but not the target identity, and (3) with both the target identity and target expression (the redundant target condition). On nontarget trials the faces contained neither the target identity nor expression. All groups were faster in responding to a face containing both the target identity and emotion compared to faces containing either single target. Furthermore the redundancy gains for combined targets exceeded performance limits predicted by the independent processing of facial identity and emotion. These results are held across the age range. The results suggest that there is interactive processing of facial identity and emotion which is independent of the effects of cognitive aging. Older participants demonstrated reliably larger size of the redundancy gains compared to the young group that reflect a greater experience with faces. Alternative explanations are discussed.

Proficiency in positive vs. negative emotion identification and subjective well-being among long-term married elderly couples

Evidence is accruing that positive emotions play a crucial role in shaping a healthy interpersonal climate. Inspired by this research, the current investigation sought to shed light on the link between proficiency in identifying positive vs. negative emotions and a close partner's well-being. To this end, we conducted two studies with neurologically intact elderly married couples (Study 1) and an age-matched clinical sample, comprising married couples in which one spouse had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (Study 2), which tends to hinder emotional expressivity. To assess proficiency in identifying emotions from whole body postures, we had participants in both studies complete a pointlight walker task, featuring four actors (two male, two female) expressing one positive (i.e., happiness) and three negative (i.e., sadness, anger, fear) basic emotions. Participants also filled out measures of subjective well-being. Among Study 1's neurologically intact spouses, greater expertise in identifying positive (but not negative) emotions was linked to greater partner life satisfaction (but not hedonic balance). Spouses of PD patients exhibited increased proficiency in identifying positive emotions relative to controls, possibly reflective of compensatory mechanisms. Complementarily, relative to controls, spouses of PD patients exhibited reduced proficiency in identifying negative emotions and a tendency to underestimate their intensity. Importantly, all of these effects attenuated with longer years from PD onset. Finally, there was evidence that it was increased partner expertise in identifying negative (rather than positive) emotional states that predicted greater life satisfaction levels among the PD patients and their spouses. Our results thus suggest that positive vs. negative emotions may play distinct roles in close relationship dynamics as a function of neurological status and disability trajectory.

Facial age affects emotional expression decoding

Facial expressions convey important information on emotional states of our interaction partners. However, in interactions between younger and older adults, there is evidence for a reduced ability to accurately decode emotional facial expressions. Previous studies have often followed up this phenomenon by examining the effect of the observers' age. However, decoding emotional faces is also likely to be influenced by stimulus features, and age-related changes in the face such as wrinkles and folds may render facial expressions of older adults harder to decode. In this paper, we review theoretical frameworks and empirical findings on age effects on decoding emotional expressions, with an emphasis on age-of-face effects. We conclude that the age of the face plays an important role for facial expression decoding. Lower expressivity, age-related changes in the face, less elaborated emotion schemas for older faces, negative attitudes toward older adults, and different visual scan patterns and neural processing of older than younger faces may lower decoding accuracy for older faces. Furthermore, age-related stereotypes and age-related changes in the face may bias the attribution of specific emotions such as sadness to older faces.

Older adults' decoding of emotions: age-related differences in interpreting dynamic emotional displays and the well-preserved ability to recognize happiness

AIM

Although the ability to recognize emotions through bodily and facial muscular movements is vital to everyday life, numerous studies have found that older adults are less adept at identifying emotions than younger adults. The message gleaned from research has been one of greater decline in abilities to recognize specific negative emotions than positive ones. At the same time, these results raise methodological issues with regard to different modalities in which emotion decoding is measured. The main aim of the present study is to identify the pattern of age differences in the ability to decode basic emotions from naturalistic visual emotional displays.

METHOD

The sample comprised a total of 208 adults from Greece, aged from 18 to 86 years. Participants were examined using the Emotion Evaluation Test, which is the first part of a broader audiovisual tool, The Awareness of Social Inference Test. The Emotion Evaluation Test was designed to examine a person's ability to identify six emotions and discriminate these from neutral expressions, as portrayed dynamically by professional actors.

RESULTS

The findings indicate that decoding of basic emotions occurs along the broad affective dimension of uncertainty, and a basic step in emotion decoding involves recognizing whether information presented is emotional or not. Age was found to negatively affect the ability to decode basic negatively valenced emotions as well as pleasant surprise. Happiness decoding is the only ability that was found well-preserved with advancing age.

CONCLUSION

The main conclusion drawn from the study is that the pattern in which emotion decoding from visual cues is affected by normal ageing depends on the rate of uncertainty, which either is related to decoding difficulties or is inherent to a specific emotion.

Recognition of emotion from body language among patients with unipolar depression

Major depression may be associated with abnormal perception of emotions and impairment in social adaptation. Emotion recognition from body language and its possible implications to social adjustment have not been examined in patients with depression. Three groups of participants (51 with depression; 68 with history of depression in remission; and 69 never depressed healthy volunteers) were compared on static and dynamic tasks of emotion recognition from body language. Psychosocial adjustment was assessed using the Social Adjustment Scale Self-Report (SAS-SR). Participants with current depression showed reduced recognition accuracy for happy stimuli across tasks relative to remission and comparison participants. Participants with depression tended to show poorer psychosocial adaptation relative to remission and comparison groups. Correlations between perception accuracy of happiness and scores on the SAS-SR were largely not significant. These results indicate that depression is associated with reduced ability to appraise positive stimuli of emotional body language but emotion recognition performance is not tied to social adjustment. These alterations do not appear to be present in participants in remission suggesting state-like qualities.

Nonverbal signals speak up: association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence

Emotional communication uses verbal and nonverbal means. In case of conflicting signals, nonverbal information is assumed to have a stronger impact. It is unclear, however, whether perceptual nonverbal dominance varies between individuals and whether it is linked to emotional intelligence. Using audiovisual stimulus material comprising verbal and nonverbal emotional cues that were varied independently, perceptual nonverbal dominance profiles and their relations to emotional intelligence were examined. Nonverbal dominance was found in every participant, ranging from 55 to 100%. Moreover, emotional intelligence, particularly the ability to understand emotions, correlated positively with nonverbal dominance. Furthermore, higher overall emotional intelligence as well as a higher ability to understand emotions were linked to smaller reaction time differences between emotionally incongruent and congruent stimuli. The association between perceptual nonverbal dominance and emotional intelligence, and more specifically the ability to understand emotions, might reflect an adaptive process driven by the experience of higher authenticity in nonverbal cues.

The effects of different attentional demands in the identification of emotional facial expressions in Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by the progressive impairment of mental and emotional functions, including the processing of emotional facial expression (EFE). Deficits in decoding EFE are relevant in social contexts in which information from 2 or more sources may be processed simultaneously. To assess the role of contextual stimuli on EFE processing in AD, we analyzed the ability of patients with AD and healthy elderly adults to identify EFE when simultaneously performing another task. Each of the 6 basic EFEs was presented to 15 patients with AD and 35 controls in a dual task paradigm that is in parallel with a visuospatial or a semantic task. Results show that the decoding of EFEs was impaired in patients with AD when they were simultaneously processing additional visuospatial information, yet not when they were performed in conjunction with a semantic task. These findings suggest that the capacity to interpret emotional states is impaired in AD.

Review of emotion recognition in mild cognitive impairment

BACKGROUND

While dysfunction in emotion recognition is sometimes apparent with aging, and is frequently evident in Alzheimer's disease, it is unclear whether individuals who have a high risk of developing dementia exhibit demonstrable changes.

METHOD

A review of the literature pertaining to mild cognitive impairment was undertaken to discern the extent to which emotion recognition deficits are evident in this prodromal period.

RESULTS

A search of Medline, Psycinfo and Psyextra databases using specific key words identified only six relevant studies. These studies suggest that the ability to accurately identify facial expressions of affect is compromised.

CONCLUSIONS

Research in this area is in its infancy. Suggestions are made for furthering our knowledge about this important ability which affects interpersonal relationships, daily functioning, mental well-being and quality of life.

Visual scanning patterns and executive function in relation to facial emotion recognition in aging

OBJECTIVE

The ability to perceive facial emotion varies with age. Relative to younger adults (YA), older adults (OA) are less accurate at identifying fear, anger, and sadness, and more accurate at identifying disgust. Because different emotions are conveyed by different parts of the face, changes in visual scanning patterns may account for age-related variability. We investigated the relation between scanning patterns and recognition of facial emotions. Additionally, as frontal-lobe changes with age may affect scanning patterns and emotion recognition, we examined correlations between scanning parameters and performance on executive function tests.

METHODS

We recorded eye movements from 16 OA (mean age 68.9) and 16 YA (mean age 19.2) while they categorized facial expressions and non-face control images (landscapes), and administered standard tests of executive function.

RESULTS

OA were less accurate than YA at identifying fear (p < .05, r = .44) and more accurate at identifying disgust (p < .05, r = .39). OA fixated less than YA on the top half of the face for disgust, fearful, happy, neutral, and sad faces (p values < .05, r values ≥ .38), whereas there was no group difference for landscapes. For OA, executive function was correlated with recognition of sad expressions and with scanning patterns for fearful, sad, and surprised expressions.

CONCLUSION

We report significant age-related differences in visual scanning that are specific to faces. The observed relation between scanning patterns and executive function supports the hypothesis that frontal-lobe changes with age may underlie some changes in emotion recognition.

Bringing an Ecological Perspective to the Study of Aging and Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions: Past, Current, and Future Methods

Older adults perform worse on traditional tests of emotion recognition accuracy than do young adults. In this paper, we review descriptive research to date on age differences in emotion recognition from facial expressions, as well as the primary theoretical frameworks that have been offered to explain these patterns. We propose that this is an area of inquiry that would benefit from an ecological approach in which contextual elements are more explicitly considered and reflected in experimental methods. Use of dynamic displays and examination of specific cues to accuracy, for example, may reveal more nuanced age-related patterns and may suggest heretofore unexplored underlying mechanisms.

Recognition of posed and spontaneous dynamic smiles in young and older adults

In 2 studies, we investigated age effects in the ability to recognize dynamic posed and spontaneous smiles. Study 1 showed that both young and older adult participants were above chance in their ability to distinguish between posed and spontaneous smiles in young adults. In Study 2, we found that young adult participant performance declined when judging a combination of both young and older adult target smiles, while older adult participants outperformed young adult participants in distinguishing between posed and spontaneous smiles. A synthesis of results across the 2 studies showed a small-to-medium age effect (d = -0.40), suggesting that older adults have an advantage in discriminating between smile types. Mixed stimuli (i.e., a mixture of young and older adult faces) may impact accurate smile discrimination. In future research, both the sources (cues) and behavioral effects of age-related differences in the discrimination of positive expressions should be investigated.

Recognition of emotion in facial expression by people with Prader-Willi syndrome

BACKGROUND

People with Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) may have mild intellectual impairments but less is known about their social cognition. Most parents/carers report that people with PWS do not have normal peer relationships, although some have older or younger friends. Two specific aspects of social cognition are being able to recognise other people's emotion and to then respond appropriately. In a previous study, mothers/carers thought that 26% of children and 23% of adults with PWS would not respond to others' feelings. They also thought that 64% could recognise happiness, sadness, anger and fear and a further 30% could recognise happiness and sadness. However, reports of emotion recognition and response to emotion were partially dissociated. It was therefore decided to test facial emotion recognition directly.

METHOD

The participants were 58 people of all ages with PWS. They were shown a total of 20 faces, each depicting one of the six basic emotions and asked to say what they thought that person was feeling. The faces were shown one at a time in random order and each was accompanied by a reminder of the six basic emotions.

RESULTS

This cohort of people with PWS correctly identified 55% of the different facial emotions. These included 90% of happy faces, 55% each of sad and surprised faces, 43% of disgusted faces, 40% of angry faces and 37% of fearful faces. Genetic subtype differences were found only in the predictors of recognition scores, not in the scores themselves. Selective impairment was found in fear recognition for those with PWS who had had a depressive illness and in anger recognition for those with PWS who had had a psychotic illness.

CONCLUSIONS

The inability to read facial expressions of emotion is a deficit in social cognition apparent in people with PWS. This may be a contributing factor in their difficulties with peer relationships.

Age-related changes in recognition and response criterion

Recognition performance does not usually change along the lifespan, but the response criterion usually does, and in general, it changes from being conservative during youth to being liberal, in old age. The focus of the present study is to analyze the changes that take place, both in discrimination and response criterion, as a result of aging in two recognition tasks: one with neutral images, and the other with faces showing positive and negative emotional expressions. Two groups of participants performed both tasks: young (N = 21; age range, 17-33 years), older (N = 21; age range, 65-91 years). The analyses of several discrimination parameters (d' and probability of recognition) and the response criterion yielded significant age differences. Thus, results indicated that the ability to discriminate of older participants was better than that of younger participants when having to recognize neutral images, and faces with negative emotional expressions. The response criterion of younger participants was always conservative, whereas older participants only showed liberal criteria in front of faces with emotional expressions. In relation to the neutral images, the response criterion of older participants was optimum, because it led to more hits, without increasing the false alarms. The results are partially explained by the tasks differential difficulty, and are discussed within the frame of Simulation theory.

The recognition of facial expressions of emotion in Alzheimer's disease: a review of findings

OBJECTIVE

To provide a selective review of the literature on the recognition of facial expressions of emotion in Alzheimer's disease (AD), to evaluate whether these patients show variation in their ability to recognise different emotions and whether any such impairments are instead because of a general decline in cognition.

METHODS

A narrative review based on relevant articles identified from PubMed and PsycInfo searches from 1987 to 2007 using keywords 'Alzheimer's', 'facial expression recognition', 'dementia' and 'emotion processing'.

CONCLUSION

Although the literature is as yet limited, with several methodological inconsistencies, AD patients show poorer recognition of facial expressions, with particular difficulty with sad expressions. It is unclear whether poorer performance reflects the general cognitive decline and/or verbal or spatial deficits associated with AD or whether the deficits reflect specific neuropathology. This under-represented field of study may help to extend our understanding of social functioning in AD. Future work requires more detailed analyses of ancillary cognitive measures, more ecologically valid facial displays of emotion and a reference situation that more closely approximates an actual social interaction.