Older and younger adults differently judge the similarity between negative affect terms

Furthering the language hypothesis of alexithymia: An integrated review and meta-analysis

Alexithymia, including the inability to identify and express one's own feelings, is a subclinical condition responsible for some of the socioemotional symptoms seen across a range of psychiatric conditions. The language hypothesis of alexithymia posits a language-mediated disruption in the development of discrete emotion concepts from ambiguous affective states, exacerbating the risk of developing alexithymia in language-impaired individuals. To provide a critical evaluation, a systematic review and meta-analysis of 29 empirical studies of language functioning in alexithymia was performed. A modest association was found between alexithymia and multi-domain language deficits (r = -0.14), including structural language, pragmatics, and propensity to use emotional language. A more theoretically-relevant subsample analysis comparing alexithymia levels in language-impaired and typical individuals revealed larger effects, but a limited number of studies adopted this approach. A synthesis of 11 emotional granularity studies also found an association between alexithymia and reduced emotional granularity (r = -0.10). Language impairments seem to increase the risk of alexithymia. Heterogeneous samples and methods suggest the need for studies with improved alexithymia assessments.

Introducing a Face Sort Paradigm to Evaluate Age Differences in Emotion Perception

OBJECTIVES

Previous research has uncovered age-related differences in emotion perception. To date, studies have relied heavily on forced-choice methods that stipulate possible responses. These constrained methods limit discovery of variation in emotion perception, which may be due to subtle differences in underlying concepts for emotion.

METHOD

We employed a face sort paradigm in which young (N = 42) and older adult (N = 43) participants were given 120 photographs portraying six target emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) and were instructed to create and label piles, such that individuals in each pile were feeling the same way.

RESULTS

There were no age differences in number of piles created, nor in how well labels mapped onto the target emotion categories. However, older adults demonstrated lower consistency in sorting, such that fewer photographs in a given pile belonged to the same target emotion category. At the same time, older adults labeled piles using emotion words that were acquired later in development, and thus are considered more semantically complex.

DISCUSSION

These findings partially support the hypothesis that older adults' concepts for emotions and emotional expressions are more complex than those of young adults, demonstrate the utility of incorporating less constrained experimental methods into the investigation of age-related differences in emotion perception, and are consistent with existing evidence of increased cognitive and emotional complexity in adulthood.