Processing own-age vs. other-age faces: neuro-behavioral correlates and effects of emotion

Why the Single-N Design Should Be the Default in Affective Neuroscience

Many studies in affective neuroscience rely on statistical procedures designed to estimate population averages and base their main conclusions on group averages. However, the obvious unit of analysis in affective neuroscience is the individual, not the group, because emotions are individual phenomena that typically vary across individuals. Conclusions based on group averages may therefore be misleading or wrong, if interpreted as statements about emotions of an individual, or meaningless, if interpreted as statements about the group, which has no emotions. We therefore advocate the Single-N design as the default strategy in research on emotions, testing one or several individuals extensively with the primary purpose of obtaining results at the individual level. In neuroscience, the equivalent to the Single-N design is deep imaging, the emerging trend of extensive measurements of activity in single brains. Apart from the fact that individuals react differently to emotional stimuli, they also vary in shape and size of their brains. Group-based analysis of brain imaging data therefore refers to an "average brain" that was activated in a way that may not be representative of the physiology of any of the tested individual brains, nor of how these brains responded to the experimental stimuli. Deep imaging avoids such group-averaging artifacts by simply focusing on the individual brain. This methodological shift toward individual analysis has already opened new research areas in fields like vision science. Inspired by this, we call for a corresponding shift in affective neuroscience, away from group averages, and toward experimental designs targeting the individual.

The effects of age bias on neural correlates of successful and unsuccessful response inhibition in younger and older adults

Facilitating communication between generations has become increasingly important. However, individuals often demonstrate a preference for their own age group, which can impact social interactions, and such bias in young adults even extends to inhibitory control. To assess whether older adults also experience this phenomenon, a group of younger and older adults completed a Go/NoGo task incorporating young and old faces, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Within the networks subserving successful and unsuccessful response inhibition, patterns of activity demonstrated distinct neural age bias effects in each age group. During successful inhibition, the older adult group demonstrated significantly increased activity to other-age faces, whereas unsuccessful inhibition in the younger group produced significantly enhanced activity to other-age faces. Consequently, the findings of the study confirm that neural responses to successful and unsuccessful inhibition can be contingent on the stimulus-specific attribute of age in both younger and older adults. These findings have important implications in regard to minimizing the emergence of negative consequences, such as ageism, as a result of related implicit biases.

Effects of aging on face processing: An ERP study of the own-age bias with neutral and emotional faces

Older adults systematically show an enhanced N170 amplitude during the visualization of facial expressions of emotion. The present study aimed to replicate this finding, further investigating if this effect is specific to facial stimuli, present in other neural correlates of face processing, and modulated by own-age faces. To this purpose, younger (n = 25; M_age = 28.36), middle-aged (n = 23; M_age = 48.74), and older adults (n = 25; M_age = 67.36) performed two face/emotion identification tasks during an EEG recording. The results showed that groups did not differ regarding P100 amplitude, but older adults had increased N170 amplitude for both facial and non-facial stimuli. The event-related potentials analysed were not modulated by an own-age bias, but older faces elicited larger N170 in the Emotion Identification Task for all groups. This increased amplitude may reflect a higher ambiguity of older faces due to age-related changes in their physical features, which may elicit higher neural resources to decode. Regarding P250, older faces elicited decreased amplitudes than younger faces, which may reflect a reduced processing of the emotional content of older faces. This interpretation is consistent with the lower accuracy obtained for this category of stimuli across groups. These results have important social implications and suggest that aging may hamper the neural processing of facial expressions of emotion, especially for own-age peers.

Social contacts and loneliness affect the own age bias for emotional faces

Individuals are better at recognizing faces of their own age group (Own Age Bias) but it is unclear whether this bias occurs also for emotional faces and to what extent is affected by loneliness. Young individuals (N = 235) completed an age categorization task on faces of young and old individuals showing neutral, happy, and angry expressions. After a filler task, they categorized as seen or novel the original set of faces intermixed with a new set. Findings showed an Own Age Bias for novel young faces but no evidence that emotion eliminates it. Recognition accuracy was better for emotional faces, but the two factors did not interact. Importantly, low loneliness was linked to an Own Age Bias for novel happy faces. These findings are discussed in the context of current theoretical accounts of the Own Age Bias and of the effects of loneliness on attention and memory.

Emotional face expressions recognition in childhood: developmental markers, age and sex effect

Recognizing emotional face expressions in others is a valuable non-verbal communication and particularly relevant throughout childhood given that children's language skills are not yet fully developed, but the first interactions with peers have just started. This study aims to investigate developmental markers of emotional facial expression in children and the effect of age and sex on it. A total of 90 children split into three age groups: 6-7 years old (n = 30); 8-9 years old (n = 30); 10-11 years old (n = 30) took part in the study. Participants were exposed to 38 photos in two exposure times (500 ms and 1000 ms) of children expressing happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise on three intensities, plus images of neutral faces. Happiness was the easiest expression to be recognized, followed by disgust and surprise. As expected, 10-11-year-old group showed the highest accuracy means, whereas 6-7-year-old group had the lowest means of accuracy. Data support the non-existence of female advantage.

The Role of the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Preferential Decisions for Own- and Other-Age Faces

Own-age bias is a well-known bias reflecting the effects of age, and its role has been demonstrated, particularly, in face recognition. However, it remains unclear whether an own-age bias exists in facial impression formation. In the present study, we used three datasets from two published and one unpublished functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that employed the same pleasantness rating task with fMRI scanning and preferential choice task after the fMRI to investigate whether healthy young and older participants showed own-age effects in face preference. Specifically, we employed a drift-diffusion model to elaborate the existence of own-age bias in the processes of preferential choice. The behavioral results showed higher rating scores and higher drift rate for young faces than for older faces, regardless of the ages of participants. We identified a young-age effect, but not an own-age effect. Neuroimaging results from aggregation analysis of the three datasets suggest a possibility that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was associated with evidence accumulation of own-age faces; however, no clear evidence was provided. Importantly, we found no age-related decline in the responsiveness of the vmPFC to subjective pleasantness of faces, and both young and older participants showed a contribution of the vmPFC to the parametric representation of the subjective value of face and functional coupling between the vmPFC and ventral visual area, which reflects face preference. These results suggest that the preferential choice of face is less susceptible to the own-age bias across the lifespan of individuals.

Neural activity in self-related brain regions in response to tailored nutritional messages predicts dietary change

Overweight and obesity have become international public health problems, so there is an urgent need to implement effective interventions that prevent these concerning health issues. Designing personalized (tailored) dietary communications has become one of the most effective tools in reducing unhealthy eating behavior, when compared with one-size-fits-all messages (untailored). However, more research is required to gain a complete understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which tailored nutritional messages elicit reductions in unhealthy dietary behavior. To the best of our knowledge, our study may be the first to use neuroimaging, namely functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), aiming to evaluate the neural basis of tailored and untailored nutritional messages and assess how these neural responses predict unhealthy food intake reduction after a month receiving tailored nutritional messages. To that goal, 30 participants were scanned while reading tailored and untailored nutritional messages. Subsequently, for a month, they received tailored interventions encouraging healthy food intake. The neural findings reveal that when compared to untailored communications, tailored messages elicit brain networks associated with self-relevance, such as the precuneus, the middle temporal gyrus, the hippocampus, the inferior orbitofrontal cortex (OBC), the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC), and the angular gyrus. Interestingly, among these self-related brain areas, the dMPFC, OFC, angular gyrus, and hippocampus forecast reductions in unhealthy food intake after a one-month tailored intervention for the cessation of unhealthy eating. These results may offer implications for clinicians, practitioners, and/or policymakers who should implement substantial efforts in creating individualized campaigns focused on their target's perceived needs, goals, and drivers in relation to eating healthy to reduce overweight issues. This research therefore constitutes a step forward in showing a direct association between the neural responses to tailored nutritional messages and changes in real-life healthy eating behavior.

The hippocampus shows an own-age bias during unfamiliar face viewing

The present study investigated the neural correlates of the own-age bias for face recognition in a repetition suppression paradigm. Healthy young and older adults viewed upright and inverted unfamiliar faces. Some of the upright faces were repeated following one of two delays (lag 0 or lag 11). Repetition suppression effects were observed in bilateral fusiform cortex. However, there were no significant effects indicating an own-age bias in repetition suppression. The absence of these effects is arguably inconsistent with perceptual expertise accounts of own-age biases in face processing. By contrast, the right anterior hippocampus showed an own-age bias (greater activity for own-age compared to other-age faces) when viewing an unfamiliar face for the first time. Given the importance of the hippocampus for episodic memory encoding, we conjecture that the increased hippocampal activity for own-age relative to other-age faces reflects differential engagement of neural processes supporting the episodic encoding of faces and might provide insight into the neural underpinnings of own-age biases in face recognition memory.

Age-of-actor effects in body expression recognition of children

Investigations of developmental trajectories for emotion recognition suggest that both face- and body expression recognition increases rapidly in early childhood and reaches adult levels of performance near the age of ten. So far, little is known about whether children's ability to recognise body expressions is influenced by the age of the person they are observing. This question is investigated here by presenting 119 children and 42 young adults with videos of children, young adults and older adults expressing emotions with their whole body. The results revealed an own-age advantage for children, reflected in adult-level accuracy for videos of children for most expressions but reduced accuracy for videos of older adults. Children's recognition of older adults' expressions was not correlated with children's estimated amount of contact with older adults. Support for potential influences of social biases on performance measures was minimal. The own-age advantage was explained in terms of children's reduced familiarity with body expressions of older adults due to aging related changes in the kinematics characteristics of movements and potentially due to stronger embodiment of other children's bodily movements.

The effect of aging on facial attractiveness: An empirical and computational investigation

How does aging affect facial attractiveness? We tested the hypothesis that people find older faces less attractive than younger faces, and furthermore, that these aging effects are modulated by the age and sex of the perceiver and by the specific kind of attractiveness judgment being made. Using empirical and computational network science methods, we confirmed that with increasing age, faces are perceived as less attractive. This effect was less pronounced in judgments made by older than younger and middle-aged perceivers, and more pronounced by men (especially for female faces) than women. Attractive older faces were perceived as elegant more than beautiful or gorgeous. Furthermore, network analyses revealed that older faces were more similar in attractiveness and were segregated from younger faces. These results indicate that perceivers tend to process older faces categorically when making attractiveness judgments. Attractiveness is not a monolithic construct. It varies by age, sex, and the dimensions of attractiveness being judged.

The effect of emotional valence and age of faces on adults and children's inattentional blindness

Inattentional blindness (IB) refers to the nature of an individual being unaware of an unexpected stimulus when focusing on an attentional task. Investigation into IB provides an innovative approach for the research of attentional bias that is connected with an individual's immediate attentional capture. This study explored the effect of emotional valence and age of faces on the IB rates of children and adults. We employed a between-subject experimental design with a 2 (age of participants: child, adult) × 2 (age of face: child face, adult face) × 2 (emotional valence: positive, negative) method and used the classic IB task of cross judgment. The participants included 79 adults (54.63 ± 8.192 years old) and 78 children (10.62 ± 2.32 years old). The results showed that: (1) The IB rates of the two groups differed significantly. Children performed better than adults in detecting the faces appearing unexpectedly. (2) The effect of emotional valence only emerged on adult participants' IB. Adults were significantly more likely to detect the positive-emotional faces than the negative-emotional ones. (3) The age of a face was not a significant factor to predict participants' IB. Neither children nor adults showed a preference for the faces of a specific age (e.g., their own age). These findings revealed the distinct characteristics of attentional capture of children and adults when confronting unexpected facial stimuli.

Are facial emotion recognition tasks adequate for assessing social cognition in older people? A review of the literature

OBJECTIVE

Facial emotion recognition (FER) is a component of social cognition and important to interpersonal relations. Therefore, tasks have been developed to assess this skill in different population. Regarding older people, even healthy individuals have a poorer performance compared to rate of correct answers commonly used to assess such tasks. Perform a systematic review to analyze studies addressing the performance of healthy older adults on FER tasks compared to the 70% correct response rate commonly used for the creation of stimulus banks.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

Searches were conducted up to May 2019 in the Pubmed, PsycInfo, Web of Science, and Scopus databases using the keywords ("faces" OR "facial") AND ("recognition" OR "expression" OR "emotional") AND ("elderly" OR "older adults").

RESULTS

Twenty-seven articles were included in the present review. In 16 studies (59.2%), older people had correct response rates on FER lower than 70% on at least one of the emotions evaluated. Among the studies that evaluated each emotion specifically, 62.5% found correct response rates lower than 70% for the emotion fear, 50% for surprise, 50% for sadness, 37.5% for anger, 21.4% for disgust, and 5.9% for happiness. Moreover, the studies that evaluated the level of intensity of the emotions demonstrated a lower rate of correct responses when the intensity of the facial expression was low.

CONCLUSION

That studies employ methods and facial stimuli that may not be adequate for measuring this skill in older people. Thus, it is important to create adequate tasks for assessing the skill in this population.

Default network interactivity during mentalizing about known others is modulated by age and social closeness

In young adults, mentalizing about known others engages the default network, with differential brain response modulated by social closeness. While the functional integrity of the default network changes with age, few studies have investigated how these changes impact the representation of known others, across levels of closeness. Young (N = 29, 16 females) and older (N = 27, 12 females) adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while making trait judgments for social others varying in closeness. Multivariate analyses (partial least squares) identified default network activation for trait judgments across both age cohorts. For young adults, romantic partner and self-judgments differed from other levels of social closeness and were associated with activity in default and salience networks. In contrast, default network interactivity was not modulated by social closeness for older adults. In two functional connectivity analyses, both age groups demonstrated connectivity between dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex and other default network regions during trait judgments. However older, but not young, adults also showed increased functional coupling between medial and lateral prefrontal brain regions that did not vary by category of known other. Mentalizing about others engages default and frontal brain regions in older adulthood, and this coupling is poorly modulated by social closeness.

Evidence of an Own-Age Bias in Facial Emotion Recognition for Adolescents With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

A common interpretation of the face-processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is that they arise from a failure to develop normative levels of perceptual expertise. One indicator of perceptual expertise for faces is the own-age bias, operationalized as a processing advantage for faces of one's own age, presumably due to more frequent contact and experience. This effect is especially evident in domains of face recognition memory but less commonly investigated in social-emotional expertise (e.g., facial emotion recognition; FER), where individuals with ASD have shown consistent deficits. In the present study, we investigated whether a FER task would elicit an own-age bias for individuals with and without ASD and explored how the magnitude of an own-age bias may differ as a function of ASD status and symptoms. Ninety-two adolescents (63 male) between the ages of 11 and 14 years completed the child- and adult-face subtests of a standardized FER task. Overall FER accuracy was found to differ by ASD severity, reflecting poorer performance for those with increased symptoms. Results also indicated that an own-age bias was evident, reflecting greater FER performance for child compared to adult faces, for all adolescents regardless of ASD status or symptoms. However, the strength of the observed own-age bias did not differ by ASD status or severity. Findings suggest that face processing abilities of adolescents with ASD may be influenced by experience with specific categories of stimuli, similar to their typically developing peers.

Emotion Recognition and Aging. Comparing a Labeling Task With a Categorization Task Using Facial Representations

Research suggests that aging comes with a decline in the ability to identify emotional expressions. In previous studies on emotion recognition and aging, participants were typically instructed to classify images of facial expressions using sets of lexical emotion labels. Yet, in daily life, when exposed to facial expressions by others, people match these with their conceptual knowledge of how emotions are visually presented (i.e., a smile for "happiness"), rather than recalling lexical labels (i.e., the word "happy"). By comparing performances of young adults and older adults on an emotion sorting task based on visual categorization and a traditional labeling task based on lexical categorization, this research aimed to explore a different way of studying emotion recognition abilities over the lifespan. In line with earlier research, results of the labeling task showed that our older participants (M age = 71.9) were less accurate in labeling emotions than participants in a young age group (M age = 23.8), especially for expressions of sadness, fear, anger and contempt. Outcomes of the categorization task suggest that older adults have difficulties separating distinctive meanings of emotions more than young adults do. Results of this study indeed shows a decline in emotion recognition using both tasks, and suggests future studies to examine possible changes in conceptual knowledge of emotions, rather than the inability to perceive certain facial cues.

Facial Expression Processing Is Not Affected by Parkinson's Disease, but by Age-Related Factors

The question whether facial expression processing may be impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients so far has yielded equivocal results – existing studies, however, have focused on testing expression processing in recognition tasks with static images of six standard, emotional facial expressions. Given that non-verbal communication contains both emotional and non-emotional, conversational expressions and that input to the brain is usually dynamic, here we address the question of potential facial expression processing differences in a novel format: we test a range of conversational and emotional, dynamic facial expressions in three groups – PD patients (n = 20), age- and education-matched older healthy controls (n = 20), and younger adult healthy controls (n = 20). This setup allows us to address both effects of PD and age-related differences. We employed a rating task for all groups in which 12 rating dimensions were used to assess evaluative processing of 27 expression videos from six different actors. We found that ratings overall were consistent across groups with several rating dimensions (such as arousal or outgoingness) having a strong correlation with the expressions’ motion energy content as measured by optic flow analysis. Most importantly, we found that the PD group did not differ in any rating dimension from the older healthy control group (HCG), indicating highly similar evaluation processing. Both older groups, however, did show significant differences for several rating scales in comparison with the younger adults HCG. Looking more closely, older participants rated negative expressions compared to the younger participants as more positive, but also as less natural, persuasive, empathic, and sincere. We interpret these findings in the context of the positivity effect and in-group processing advantages. Overall, our findings do not support strong processing deficits due to PD, but rather point to age-related differences in facial expression processing.

Amygdala functional network during recognition of own-age vs. other-age faces in younger and older adults

Facial cues, such as a person's age, provide important information for social interactions. Processing such facial cues can be affected by observer bias. However, there is currently no consensus regarding how the brain is processing facial cues related to age, and if facial age processing changes as a function of the age of the observer (i.e., own-age bias). The primary study aim was to investigate functional networks involved in processing own-age vs. other-age faces among younger and older adults and determine how emotional expression of the face modulates own-age vs. other-age face processing. The secondary study aim was to examine the relation between higher social cognitive processes (i.e., empathy) and modulation of brain activity by facial age and emotional expression. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) younger and older participants were asked to recognize happy, angry, and neutral expressions in own-age and other-age faces. Functional connectivity analyses with the amygdala as seed showed that for own-age faces both age groups recruited a network of regions including the anterior cingulate and anterior insula that was involved in empathy and detection of salient information. Brain-behavior analyses furthermore showed that empathic responses in younger, but not in older, participants were positively correlated with engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of angry own-age faces. These findings identify the neurobehavioral correlates of facial age processing, and its modulation by emotion expression, and directly link facial cue processing to higher-order social cognitive functioning.

Own-Age Bias and Positivity Effects in Facial Recognition

Background/Study Context - In the current study, we evaluated two age-related differences in recognition memory: the own-age bias, wherein older and younger adults best recognize those of their own age group, and an age-related positivity effect, wherein older adults recall positive emotional information better than negative information relative to younger adults. We sought to extend previous research that jointly investigated these variables in recognition memory. Methods - Younger (age 18 - 27) and older (age 62 - 80) adults completed an incidental encoding task on a sequence of 50 positive, negative, or neutrally valenced images of older and younger adult faces. After a distractor task, participants made forced-choice recognition judgments and rated their decision confidence for images that were repeated with the same or a different emotional expression, and for novel, previously unseen faces. Results - Older and younger adults' recognition discriminability did not differ significantly between age groups. Notably, the data indicated an own-age bias in young adults, but not in older adults, and both age groups' recognition accuracy was greatest for faces that had originally been shown with a positive emotional expression. Conclusion - To our knowledge, this research is the first to demonstrate an own-age recognition bias in younger adults for emotional faces. Although our predictions of a differential impact by emotional faces on recognition of same and other-age faces were not supported, we identify a number of factors that contextualize these findings in the recent literature.

Adults’ Markers of Face Processing Are Present at Age 6 and Are Interconnected Along Development

Recent studies on the development of face processing argue for a late, quantitative, domain-specific development of face processing, and face memory in particular. Most previous findings were based on separately tracking the developmental course of face perception skills, comparing performance across different age groups. Here, we adopted a different approach studying the mechanisms underlying the development of face processing by focusing on how different face skills are interrelated over the years (age 6 to adulthood). Specifically, we examined correlations within and between different categories of tasks: face domain-specific skills involving face recognition based on long-term representations (famous face), and short-term memory retention (Cambridge Face Memory Test), perceptual face-specific marker (inversion effect), global effects in scene perception (global–local task), and the perception of facial expressions. Factor analysis revealed that face identity skills have a similar pattern of interrelations throughout development, identifying two factors: a face domain-specific factor comprising adultlike markers of face processing and a general factor incorporating related, but nonspecific perceptual skills. Domain-specific age-related changes in face recognition entailing short- and long-term retention of face representations were observed, along with mature perceptual face-specific markers and more general perceptual effects predicting face perception skills already at age 6. The results suggest that the domain-specific changes in face processing are unlikely to result from developmental changes in perceptual skills driving face recognition. Instead, development may either involve improvement in the ability to retain face representations in memory or changes in the interactions between the perceptual representations of faces and their representations in long-term memory.

Dietary dopamine depletion blunts reward network sensitivity to face trustworthiness

Research demonstrating responsiveness of the neural reward network to face trustworthiness has not assessed whether the effects are mediated by dopaminergic function. We filled this gap in the literature by investigating whether dietary dopamine depletion would blunt the sensitivity of neural activation to faces varying in trustworthiness across reward regions as well as the sensitivity of behavioral responses to those faces. As prolactin release is negatively regulated by dopamine, peripheral prolactin levels confirmed the efficacy of our manipulation. The dopamine depletion manipulation moderated neural activation to face trustworthiness in the amygdala, medial orbital frontal cortex, and ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Control participants ( n=20) showed nonlinear and linear neural activation to face trustworthiness in the amygdala and ventral medial prefrontal cortex, and nonlinear activation in the medial orbital frontal cortex, while depleted participants ( n=20) showed only a linear effect in the amygdala. Controls also showed stronger amygdala activation to high trustworthy faces than depleted participants. In contrast to effects on neural activation, dopamine depletion did not blunt the sensitivity of behavioral ratings. While this is the first study to demonstrate that dopamine depletion blunts the sensitivity of the neural reward system to social stimuli, namely faces varying in trustworthiness, future research should investigate behavioral measures that may be more responsive to dopaminergic effects than face ratings. Such research would shed further light on the possibility that individual differences in dopaminergic function that were simulated by our manipulation influence social interactions with people who vary in facial trustworthiness.

Neural correlates of gender congruence in audiovisual commercials for gender-targeted products: An fMRI study

This article explores neural and self-report responses to gender congruence in product-voice combinations in commercials. An fMRI study was carried out in which participants (n = 30) were presented with gender-targeted pictures of characteristic male or female products accompanied by either gender congruent or incongruent voices. The findings show that attitudes are more positive toward commercials with gender congruent than with gender incongruent product-voice combinations. fMRI analyses revealed that primary visual brain areas, namely calcarine and cuneus, responded stronger to congruent than incongruent combinations suggesting that participants enhanced their endogenous attention toward congruent commercials. Incongruent combinations, by contrast, elicited stronger activation in areas related to the perception of conflicts in information processing and error monitoring, such as the supramarginal, inferior parietal gyri and superior, and middle temporal gyri. Interestingly, increased activation in the posterior cingulate cortex (an area related to value encoding) predicted more positive attitudes toward congruent commercials. Together, these results advance our understanding of the neural correlates of processing congruent and incongruent audiovisual stimuli. These findings may advice advertising professionals in designing successful campaigns of everyday products, namely by making use of congruent instead of incongruent product-voice combinations.

Sex, Age, and Emotional Valence: Revealing Possible Biases in the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' Task

The 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' test (RMET) assesses a specific socio-cognitive ability, i.e., the ability to identify mental states from gaze. The development of this ability in a lifespan perspective is of special interest. Whereas former investigations were limited mainly to childhood and adolescence, the focus has been shifted towards aging, and psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases recently. Although the RMET is frequently applied in developmental psychology and clinical settings, stimulus characteristics have never been investigated with respect to potential effects on test performance. Here, we analyzed the RMET stimulus set with a special focus on interrelations between sex, age and emotional valence. Forty-three persons rated age and emotional valence of the RMET picture set. Differences in emotional valence and age ratings between male and female items were analyzed. The linear relation between age and emotional valence was tested over all items, and separately for male and female items. Male items were rated older and more negative than female stimuli. Regarding male RMET items, age predicted emotional valence: older age was associated with negative emotions. Contrary, age and valence were not linearly related in female pictures. All ratings were independent of rater characteristics. Our results demonstrate a strong confound between sex, age, and emotional valence in the RMET. Male items presented a greater variability in age ratings compared to female items. Age and emotional valence were negatively associated among male items, but no significant association was found among female stimuli. As personal attributes impact social information processing, our results may add a new perspective on the interpretation of previous findings on interindividual differences in RMET accuracy, particularly in the field of developmental psychology, and age-associated neuropsychiatric diseases. A revision of the RMET might be afforded to overcome confounds identified here.

Older adults' neural activation in the reward circuit is sensitive to face trustworthiness

We examined older adult (OA) and younger adult (YA) neural sensitivity to face trustworthiness in reward circuit regions, previously found to respond to trustworthiness in YA. Interactions of face trustworthiness with age revealed effects exclusive to OA in the amygdala and caudate, and an effect that was not moderated by age in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). OA, but not YA, showed a nonlinear amygdala response to face trustworthiness, with significantly stronger activation response to high than to medium trustworthy faces, and no difference between low and medium or high. This may explain why an earlier study investigating OA amygdala activation to trustworthiness failed to find a significant effect, since only the linear low versus high trustworthiness difference was assessed. OA, but not YA, also showed significantly stronger activation to high than to low trustworthy faces in the right caudate, indicating a positive linear effect, consistent with previous YA research, as well as significantly stronger activation to high than to medium but not low trustworthy faces in the left caudate, indicating a nonlinear effect. Activation in dACC across both age groups showed a positive linear effect consistent with previous YA research. Finally, OA rated the faces as more trustworthy than did YA across all levels of trustworthiness. Future research should examine whether the null effects for YA were due to our inclusion of older faces. Research also should investigate possible implications of our findings for more ecologically valid OA responses to people who vary in facial trustworthiness.

Neural Temporal Dynamics of Facial Emotion Processing: Age Effects and Relationship to Cognitive Function

This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the effects of age on neural temporal dynamics of processing task-relevant facial expressions and their relationship to cognitive functions. Negative (sad, afraid, angry, and disgusted), positive (happy), and neutral faces were presented to 30 older and 31 young participants who performed a facial emotion categorization task. Behavioral and ERP indices of facial emotion processing were analyzed. An enhanced N170 for negative faces, in addition to intact right-hemispheric N170 for positive faces, was observed in older adults relative to their younger counterparts. Moreover, older adults demonstrated an attenuated within-group N170 laterality effect for neutral faces, while younger adults showed the opposite pattern. Furthermore, older adults exhibited sustained temporo-occipital negativity deflection over the time range of 200–500 ms post-stimulus, while young adults showed posterior positivity and subsequent emotion-specific frontal negativity deflections. In older adults, decreased accuracy for labeling negative faces was positively correlated with Montreal Cognitive Assessment Scores, and accuracy for labeling neutral faces was negatively correlated with age. These findings suggest that older people may exert more effort in structural encoding for negative faces and there are different response patterns for the categorization of different facial emotions. Cognitive functioning may be related to facial emotion categorization deficits observed in older adults. This may not be attributable to positivity effects: it may represent a selective deficit for the processing of negative facial expressions in older adults.

Age-congruency and contact effects in body expression recognition from point-light displays (PLD)

Recognition of older people’s body expressions is a crucial social skill. We here investigate how age, not just of the observer, but also of the observed individual, affects this skill. Age may influence the ability to recognize other people’s body expressions by changes in one’s own ability to perform certain action over the life-span (i.e., an own-age bias may occur, with best recognition for one’s own age). Whole body point light displays of children, young adults and older adults (>70 years) expressing six different emotions were presented to observers of the same three age-groups. Across two variations of the paradigm, no evidence for the predicted own-age bias (a cross-over interaction between one’s own age and the observed person’s age) was found. Instead, experience effects were found with children better recognizing older actors’ expressions of ‘active emotions,’ such as anger and happiness with greater exposure in daily life. Together, the findings suggest that age-related changes in one own’s mobility only influences body expression categorization in young children who interact frequently with older adults.

Hippocampal Brain Volume Is Associated with Faster Facial Emotion Identification in Older Adults: Preliminary Results

Quick correct identification of facial emotions is highly relevant for successful social interactions. Research suggests that older, compared to young, adults experience increased difficulty with face and emotion processing skills. While functional neuroimaging studies suggest age differences in neural processing of faces and emotions, evidence about age-associated structural brain changes and their involvement in face and emotion processing is scarce. Using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), this study investigated the extent to which volumes of frontal and temporal brain structures were related to reaction time in accurate identification of facial emotions in 30 young and 30 older adults. Volumetric segmentation was performed using FreeSurfer and gray matter volumes from frontal and temporal regions were extracted. Analysis of covariances (ANCOVAs) models with response time (RT) as the dependent variable and age group and regional volume, and their interaction, as independent variables were conducted, controlling for total intracranial volume (ICV). Results indicated that, in older adults, larger hippocampal volumes were associated with faster correct facial emotion identification. These preliminary observations suggest that greater volume in brain regions associated with face and emotion processing contributes to improved facial emotion identification performance in aging.

Pruning or tuning? Maturational profiles of face specialization during typical development

INTRODUCTION

Face processing undergoes significant developmental change with age. Two kinds of developmental changes in face specialization were examined in this study: specialized maturation, or the continued tuning of a region to faces but little change in the tuning to other categories; and competitive interactions, or the continued tuning to faces accompanied by decreased tuning to nonfaces (i.e., pruning).

METHODS

Using fMRI, in regions where adults showed a face preference, a face- and object-specialization index were computed for younger children (5-8 years), older children (9-12 years) and adults (18-45 years). The specialization index was scaled to each subject's maximum activation magnitude in each region to control for overall age differences in the activation level.

RESULTS

Although no regions showed significant face specialization in the younger age group, regions strongly associated with social cognition (e.g., right posterior superior temporal sulcus, right inferior orbital cortex) showed specialized maturation, in which tuning to faces increased with age but there was no pruning of nonface responses. Conversely, regions that are associated with more basic perceptual processing or motor mirroring (right middle temporal cortex, right inferior occipital cortex, right inferior frontal opercular cortex) showed competitive interactions in which tuning to faces was accompanied by pruning of object responses with age.

CONCLUSIONS

The overall findings suggest that cortical maturation for face processing is regional-specific and involves both increased tuning to faces and diminished response to nonfaces. Regions that show competitive interactions likely support a more generalized function that is co-opted for face processing with development, whereas regions that show specialized maturation increase their tuning to faces, potentially in an activity-dependent, experience-driven manner.

ERP evidence for own-age effects on late stages of processing sad faces

Faces convey important information on interaction partners, such as their emotional state and age. Faces of the same age are, according to recent research, preferentially processed. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the neural processes underlying this own-age effect are influenced by the emotional expression of the face, and to explore possible explanations such as the frequency or quality of contact to own-age versus other-age groups. Event-related potentials were recorded while 19 younger (18-30 years) and 19 older (64-86 years) observers watched younger and older sad and happy faces. Sad but not happy faces elicited higher late positive potential amplitudes for own-age than for other-age faces. This own-age effect was significant for older, but not for younger, observers, and correlated with the quality of contact with the own-age versus the other-age group. This pattern suggests that sad own-age faces are motivationally more relevant.

Typical and atypical neurodevelopment for face specialization: an FMRI study

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their relatives process faces differently from typically developed (TD) individuals. In an fMRI face-viewing task, TD and undiagnosed sibling (SIB) children (5-18 years) showed face specialization in the right amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, with left fusiform and right amygdala face specialization increasing with age in TD subjects. SIBs showed extensive antero-medial temporal lobe activation for faces that was not present in any other group, suggesting a potential compensatory mechanism. In ASD, face specialization was minimal but increased with age in the right fusiform and decreased with age in the left amygdala, suggesting atypical development of a frontal-amygdala-fusiform system which is strongly linked to detecting salience and processing facial information.

Emotional expressions of old faces are perceived as more positive and less negative than young faces in young adults

Interpreting the emotions of others through their facial expressions can provide important social information, yet the way in which we judge an emotion is subject to psychosocial factors. We hypothesized that the age of a face would bias how the emotional expressions are judged, with older faces generally more likely to be viewed as having more positive and less negative expressions than younger faces. Using two-alternative forced-choice perceptual decision tasks, participants sorted young and old faces of which emotional expressions were gradually morphed into one of two categories-"neutral vs. happy" and "neutral vs. angry." The results indicated that old faces were more frequently perceived as having a happy expression at the lower emotional intensity levels, and less frequently perceived as having an angry expression at the higher emotional intensity levels than younger faces in young adults. Critically, the perceptual decision threshold at which old faces were judged as happy was lower than for young faces, and higher for angry old faces compared to young faces. These findings suggest that the age of the face influences how its emotional expression is interpreted in social interactions.

Emotion and aging: evidence from brain and behavior

Emotions play a central role in every human life from the moment we are born until we die. They prepare the body for action, highlight what should be noticed and remembered, and guide decisions and actions. As emotions are central to daily functioning, it is important to understand how aging affects perception, memory, experience, as well as regulation of emotions. The Frontiers research topic Emotion and Aging: Evidence from Brain and Behavior takes a step into uncovering emotional aging considering both brain and behavioral processes. The contributions featured in this issue adopt innovative theoretical perspectives and use novel methodological approaches to target a variety of topics that can be categorized into three overarching questions: How do cognition and emotion interact in aging in brain and behavior? What are behavioral and brain-related moderators of emotional aging? Does emotion-regulatory success as reflected in brain and behavior change with age? In this perspective paper we discuss theoretical innovation, methodological approach, and scientific advancement of the 13 papers in the context of the broader literature on emotional aging. We conclude by reflecting on topics untouched and future directions to take.

Selective control of attention supports the positivity effect in aging

There is emerging evidence for a positivity effect in healthy aging, which describes an age-specific increased focus on positive compared to negative information. Life-span researchers have attributed this effect to the selective allocation of cognitive resources in the service of prioritized emotional goals. We explored the basic principles of this assumption by assessing selective attention and memory for visual stimuli, differing in emotional content and self-relevance, in young and old participants. To specifically address the impact of cognitive control, voluntary attentional selection during the presentation of multiple-item displays was analyzed and linked to participants' general ability of cognitive control. Results revealed a positivity effect in older adults' selective attention and memory, which was particularly pronounced for self-relevant stimuli. Focusing on positive and ignoring negative information was most evident in older participants with a generally higher ability to exert top-down control during visual search. Our findings highlight the role of controlled selectivity in the occurrence of a positivity effect in aging. Since the effect has been related to well-being in later life, we suggest that the ability to selectively allocate top-down control might represent a resilience factor for emotional health in aging.

Own-race and own-age biases facilitate visual awareness of faces under interocular suppression

The detection of a face in a visual scene is the first stage in the face processing hierarchy. Although all subsequent, more elaborate face processing depends on the initial detection of a face, surprisingly little is known about the perceptual mechanisms underlying face detection. Recent evidence suggests that relatively hard-wired face detection mechanisms are broadly tuned to all face-like visual patterns as long as they respect the typical spatial configuration of the eyes above the mouth. Here, we qualify this notion by showing that face detection mechanisms are also sensitive to face shape and facial surface reflectance properties. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to render faces invisible at the beginning of a trial and measured the time upright and inverted faces needed to break into awareness. Young Caucasian adult observers were presented with faces from their own race or from another race (race experiment) and with faces from their own age group or from another age group (age experiment). Faces matching the observers’ own race and age group were detected more quickly. Moreover, the advantage of upright over inverted faces in overcoming CFS, i.e., the face inversion effect (FIE), was larger for own-race and own-age faces. These results demonstrate that differences in face shape and surface reflectance influence access to awareness and configural face processing at the initial detection stage. Although we did not collect data from observers of another race or age group, these findings are a first indication that face detection mechanisms are shaped by visual experience with faces from one’s own social group. Such experience-based fine-tuning of face detection mechanisms may equip in-group faces with a competitive advantage for access to conscious awareness.

Adult age-differences in subjective impression of emotional faces are reflected in emotion-related attention and memory tasks

Although younger and older adults appear to attend to and remember emotional faces differently, less is known about age-related differences in the subjective emotional impression (arousal, potency, and valence) of emotional faces and how these differences, in turn, are reflected in age differences in various emotional tasks. In the current study, we used the same facial emotional stimuli (angry and happy faces) in four tasks: emotional rating, attention, categorical perception, and visual short-term memory (VSTM). The aim of this study was to investigate effects of age on the subjective emotional impression of angry and happy faces and to examine whether any age differences were mirrored in measures of emotional behavior (attention, categorical perception, and memory). In addition, regression analyses were used to further study impression-behavior associations. Forty younger adults (range 20-30 years) and thirty-nine older adults (range 65-75 years) participated in the experiment. The emotional rating task showed that older adults perceived less arousal, potency, and valence than younger adults and that the difference was more pronounced for angry than happy faces. Similarly, the results of the attention and memory tasks demonstrated interaction effects between emotion and age, and age differences on these measures were larger for angry than for happy faces. Regression analyses confirmed that in both age groups, higher potency ratings predicted both visual search and VSTM efficiency. Future studies should consider the possibility that age differences in the subjective emotional impression of facial emotional stimuli may explain age differences in attention to and memory of such stimuli.

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.

Valence-based age differences in medial prefrontal activity during impression formation

Reports of age-related changes to medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity during socio-cognitive tasks have shown both age-equivalence and under recruitment. Emotion work illustrates selective mPFC response dependent on valence, such that negative emotional images evoke increased ventral mPFC activity for younger adults, while older adults recruit vmPFC more for positive material. By testing whether this differential age-related response toward valenced material is also present for the social task of forming impressions, we may begin to understand inconsistencies regarding when age differences are present vs. absent in the literature. Using fMRI, participants intentionally formed impressions of positive and negative face-behavior pairs in anticipation of a memory task. Extending previous findings to a social task, valence-based reversals were present in dorsal and ventral mPFC, and posterior cingulate cortex. Younger adults elicited increased activity when forming negative impressions, while older adults had more recruitment when forming positive impressions. This suggests an age-related shift toward emphasizing positive social information may be reflected in the recruitment of regions supporting forming impressions. Overall, the results indicate an age-related shift in neural response to socio-cognitive stimuli that is valence dependent rather than a general age-related reduction in activity, in part informing prior inconsistencies within the literature.

Oxytocin and socioemotional aging: Current knowledge and future trends

The oxytocin (OT) system is involved in various aspects of social cognition and prosocial behavior. Specifically, OT has been examined in the context of social memory, emotion recognition, cooperation, trust, empathy, and bonding, and-though evidence is somewhat mixed-intranasal OT appears to benefit aspects of socioemotional functioning. However, most of the extant data on aging and OT is from animal research and human OT research has focused largely on young adults. As such, though we know that various socioemotional capacities change with age, we know little about whether age-related changes in the OT system may underlie age-related differences in socioemotional functioning. In this review, we take a genetic-neuro-behavioral approach and evaluate current evidence on age-related changes in the OT system as well as the putative effects of these alterations on age-related socioemotional functioning. Looking forward, we identify informational gaps and propose an Age-Related Genetic, Neurobiological, Sociobehavioral Model of Oxytocin (AGeNeS-OT model) which may structure and inform investigations into aging-related genetic, neural, and sociocognitive processes related to OT. As an exemplar of the use of the model, we report exploratory data suggesting differences in socioemotional processing associated with genetic variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) in samples of young and older adults. Information gained from this arena has translational potential in depression, social stress, and anxiety-all of which have high relevance in aging-and may contribute to reducing social isolation and improving well-being of individuals across the lifespan.