Aging and emotional expressions: is there a positivity bias during dynamic emotion recognition?

Detecting implicit and explicit facial emotions at different ages

Emotions are processed in the brain through a cortical route, responsible for detailed-conscious recognition and mainly based on image High Spatial Frequencies (HSF), and a subcortical route, responsible for coarse-unconscious processing and based on Low SF (LSF). However, little is known about possible changes in the functioning of the two routes in ageing. In the present go/no-go online task, 112 younger adults and 111 older adults were asked to press a button when a happy or angry face appeared (go) and to inhibit responses for neutral faces (no-go). Facial stimuli were presented unfiltered (broadband image), filtered at HSF and LSF, and hybrids (LSF of an emotional expression superimposed to the HSF of the same face with a neutral expression). All stimuli were also presented rotated on the vertical axis (upside-down) to investigate the global analysis of faces in ageing. Results showed an overall better performance of younger compared to older participants for all conditions except for hybrid stimuli. The expected face-inversion effect was confirmed in both age groups. We conclude that, besides an overall worsening of the perceptual skill with ageing, no specific impairment in the functioning of both the cortical and the subcortical route emerged.

The effect of aging and emotions on time processing

BACKGROUND

Time perception is an automatic process that can be influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

AIMS

This study aimed to investigate the effect of age and emotions on the ability to keep track of short suprasecond intervals.

METHODS

Younger adults (N = 108, age range: 18-35) and older adults (N = 51, age range: 65-87) were asked to reproduce, bisect, or double the duration of facial stimuli randomly presented for 1500, 3000, and 4500 ms. The experiment included facial stimuli with positive, negative, or neutral expressions.

RESULTS

The participants across age correctly reproduced intervals but overestimated and underestimated them when asked to bisect and double the intervals, respectively. Overall, when faces were presented with a positive or negative expression, an overestimation of time intervals emerged compared to faces with neutral expressions. Emotions had a greater effect on older adults, who showed a greater overestimation of positive facial expressions and an underestimation of sad, but not angry, facial expressions.

DISCUSSION

The results provide evidence that time perception is influenced by age and emotions, with older adults showing a greater effect of emotions on time processing.

CONCLUSION

The study suggests an interaction among time processing, age, and emotions, highlighting an automatic relationship among these domains, often considered independent.

Pleasure before business: emotions and age effects on daily activity scheduling

Activity scheduling represents a key process in daily life, involving the evaluation of the costs and benefits of the resources to be invested, but also a preference for when to engage in pleasant or unpleasant activities. Aging affects the evaluation processes and individual preferences due to changes in cognitive functioning and life perspectives. The present study investigated the differences between younger adults (age range 19-33) and older adults (age range 65-87) in a task assessing preferential scheduling of activities. Participants were asked to schedule thirty emotional activities (positive, negative, or neutral) within a 30-day time window, assigning one activity for each day. Results indicated that older adults, but not younger adults, planned positive activities closer in time, supporting the "positivity effect". Also, both younger and older adults tended to postpone negative activities, scheduling them in the last days. Finally, for older adults only, negative affect was associated with the tendency to put positive activities closer in time. Present findings showed age-specific effects of emotional content on daily activity scheduling.

Age Effects in Emotional Memory and Associated Eye Movements

Mnemonic enhanced memory has been observed for negative events. Here, we investigate its association with spatiotemporal attention, consolidation, and age. An ingenious method to study visual attention for emotional stimuli is eye tracking. Twenty young adults and twenty-one older adults encoded stimuli depicting neutral faces, angry faces, and houses while eye movements were recorded. The encoding phase was followed by an immediate and delayed (48 h) recognition assessment. Linear mixed model analyses of recognition performance with group, emotion, and their interaction as fixed effects revealed increased performance for angry compared to neutral faces in the young adults group only. Furthermore, young adults showed enhanced memory for angry faces compared to older adults. This effect was associated with a shorter fixation duration for angry faces compared to neutral faces in the older adults group. Furthermore, the results revealed that total fixation duration was a strong predictor for face memory performance.

Aging and distractor resistance in working memory: Does emotional valence matter?

Background

Emotional stimuli used as targets of working memory (WM) tasks can moderate age-related differences in WM performance, showing that aging is associated with reductions in negativity bias. This phenomenon is referred to as the positivity effect. However, there is little research on whether emotional distractors have a similar moderating effect. Moreover, the underlying neural mechanism of this effect has not been studied. In this study, we examined the behavioral and neurophysiological basis for age differences in resistance to emotional distractors within WM.

Methods

Older adults (n = 30, ages 60–74) and young adults (n = 35, ages 19–26) performed a 2-back task in which a digit was superimposed on a face with a happy, angry, or neutral expression as a distractor. Event-related potential (ERP) was simultaneously recorded to assess P2, N2, and later positive potential (LPP) amplitudes.

Results

Older adults were less accurate and slower than young adults on the WM task. Moreover, the results demonstrated a significant interaction between age and emotional valence on response accuracy, young adults' performance was worse when the distractor was neutral or positive than when it was negative, but there was no effect of the emotional valence of distractors on older adults’ WM performance. ERP analyses revealed greater P2 amplitude in older adults than young adults, regardless of the emotional valence of distractors. However, older adults and young adults did not differ on N2 or LPP amplitude, and negative distractors elicited greater N2 than positive distractors in both age groups.

Conclusions

The behavioral findings provided evidence of age-related reductions in negativity bias. Thus, the behavioral measures indicated a positivity effect in WM. However, the ERP results did not show this same interaction. These discrepant results raise questions about whether and to what extent older and young adults differ in controlling the effect of emotional distractors in WM.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40359-022-00953-y.

Effects of Tai Chi and Walking Exercise on Emotional Face Recognition in Elderly People: An ERP Study

Both tai chi and walking can improve the physical health of the elderly, but the effect on the emotional cognitive function of the elderly is unclear. To investigate the effect of long-term walking and tai chi exercise on the emotional cognitive function of the elderly, 63 subjects were recruited in this study according to age and exercise habits, including 16 in the youth control group, 15 in the elderly non-exercise control group, 17 in the elderly walking group, and 18 in the elderly tai chi group. The “learning–test paradigm” of emotional faces was used to measure the subjects’ ability to recognize and remember emotional (negative and neutral) faces. Behavioral and EEG data were recorded during the learning and testing phases. The results showed that there is aging in emotional cognition in older adults compared with younger adults. Long-term walking and tai chi exercise can delay the deterioration of emotional cognitive function in older adults to some extent. Both walking and tai chi exercise can delay the decline in aging-related emotional face recognition function to some extent. Walking exercise can delay the decline in aging-related emotional face memory function to some extent.

Are Face Masks a Problem for Emotion Recognition? Not When the Whole Body Is Visible

The rise of the novel COVID-19 virus has made face masks commonplace items around the globe. Recent research found that face masks significantly impair emotion recognition on isolated faces. However, faces are rarely seen in isolation and the body is also a key cue for emotional portrayal. Here, therefore, we investigated the impact of face masks on emotion recognition when surveying the full body. Stimuli expressing anger, happiness, sadness, and fear were selected from the BEAST stimuli set. Masks were added to these images and participants were asked to recognize the emotion and give a confidence level for that decision for both the masked and unmasked stimuli. We found that, contrary to some work viewing faces in isolation, emotion recognition was generally not impaired by face masks when the whole body is present. We did, however, find that when viewing masked faces, only the recognition of happiness significantly decreased when the whole body was present. In contrast to actual performance, confidence levels were found to decline during the Mask condition across all emotional conditions. This research suggests that the impact of masks on emotion recognition may not be as pronounced as previously thought, as long as the whole body is also visible.

Face Mask Reduces the Effect of Proposer’s (Un)Trustworthiness on Intertemporal and Risky Choices

Previous literature suggested that individuals increase temporal and risk discounting at the presence of a proposer whose face is perceived as untrustworthy, suggesting the activation of protective choice patterns. By the way, the COVID-19 pandemic has substantially transformed the way we interact with other people, even bringing us into situations where the face of the person making a proposal is not fully visible, because of the mask. With the current study, we aimed at verifying if the effect of proposer’s facial (un)trustworthiness on discounting behavior is modulated by mask wearing. In two different experiments, participants performed traditional delay and probability discounting tasks with masked proposers manipulated across trustworthiness levels. Results highlighted that, even after checking for subject-specific emotion recognition ability with masked faces, the presence of a masked untrustworthy proposer increases both delay and probability discounting parameters, although the effect is not statistically significant and smaller than the one detected at the presence of an untrustworthy proposer without a mask. These results suggest that the ability to perceive the proposer’s (un)trustworthiness is affected by the mask, with a consequent less strong effect of proposer’s (un)trustworthiness on choice behavior on both intertemporal and risky choices. Limits and possible implications are outlined and discussed.

"When did you see it?" The effect of emotional valence on temporal source memory in aging

Previous studies consistently showed age-related differences in temporal judgment and temporal memory. Importantly, emotional valence plays a crucial role in older adults' information processing. In this study, we examined the effects of emotions at the intersection between time and memory, analysing age-related differences in a temporal source memory task. Twenty-five younger adults (age range 18-35), 25 old adults (age range 65-74), and 25 old-old adults (age range 75-84) saw a series of emotional pictures in three sessions separated by a one-day rest period. In the fourth session, participants were asked to indicate in which session (1, 2, or 3) they saw each picture. Results showed that old-old adults tended to collocate negative pictures distant in time, while positive stimuli were remembered as more recent than real, compared to neutral pictures. To a lower extent, people over 65 showed the same pattern of results. In contrast, emotional valence did not affect younger adults' temporal positioning of stimuli. Current findings fit well with the Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory's assumptions and extended the literature on the positivity effect to temporal source memory.

General cognitive decline does not account for older adults' worse emotion recognition and theory of mind

Older adults have both worse general cognition and worse social cognition. A frequent suggestion is that worse social cognition is due to worse general cognition. However, previous studies have often provided contradictory evidence. The current study examined this issue with a more extensive battery of tasks for both forms of cognition. We gave 47 young and 40 older adults three tasks to assess general cognition (processing speed, working memory, fluid intelligence) and three tasks to assess their social cognition (emotion and theory-of-mind). Older adults did worse on all tasks and there were correlations between general and social cognition. Although working memory and fluid intelligence were unique predictors of performance on the Emotion Photos task and the Eyes task, Age Group was a unique predictor on all three social cognition tasks. Thus, there were relations between the two forms of cognition but older adults continued to do worse than young adults even after accounting for general cognition. We argue that this pattern of results is due to some overlap in brain areas mediating general and social cognition, but also independence, and with a differential rate of decline in brain areas dedicated to general cognition versus social cognition.

Sensitivity to Emotion Intensity and Recognition of Emotion Expression in Neurotypical Children

This study assessed two components of face emotion processing: emotion recognition and sensitivity to intensity of emotion expressions and their relation in children age 4 to 12 (N = 216). Results indicated a slower development in the accurate decoding of low intensity expressions compared to high intensity. Between age 4 and 12, children discriminated high intensity expressions better than low ones. The intensity of expression had a stronger impact on overall face expression recognition. High intensity happiness was better recognized than low intensity up to age 11, while children 4 to 12 had difficulties discriminating between high and low intensity sadness. Our results suggest that sensitivity to low intensity expressions acts as a complementary mediator between age and emotion expression recognition, while this was not the case for the recognition of high intensity expressions. These results could help in the development of specific interventions for populations presenting socio-cognitive and emotion difficulties.

Impaired remapping of social relationships in older adults

Social relationships are a central aspect of our everyday life, yet our ability to change established social relationships is an under-investigated topic. Here, we use the concept of cognitive mapping to investigate the plasticity of social relationships in younger and older adults. We describe social relationships within a 'social space', defined as a two-dimensional grid composed of the axis 'power' and 'affiliation', and investigate it using a 3D virtual environment with interacting avatars. We show that participants remap dimensions in 'social space' when avatars show conflicting behavior compared to consistent behavior and that, while older adults show similar updating behavior than younger adults, they show a distinct reduction in remapping social space. Our data provide first evidence that older adults show more rigid social behavior when avatars change their behavior in the dimensions of power and affiliation, which may explain age-related social behavior differences in everyday life.

Updating the Chieti Affective Action Videos database with older adults

Validation of the Chieti Affective Action Videos (CAAV) database was replicated with a sample of older adults (age range 65-93). When designing experimental studies of emotions, it is crucial to take into consideration the differences in emotional processing between young and older adults. Therefore, the main goal of the present study was to provide an appropriate dataset for the use of CAAV in aging research. For this reason, the CAAV administration and the data collection methodology was faithfully replicated in a sample of 302 older adults. All the 360 standardized stimuli were evaluated on the emotional dimensions of valence and arousal. The CAAV validation in an older adults' population increases the potential use of this innovative tool. The present validation supports the use of the CAAV database in future experimental studies on cognitive functions in healthy and pathological aging.

Identifying Variables That Predict Depression Following the General Lockdown During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study aimed to define the psychological markers for future development of depression symptoms following the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. Based on previous studies, we focused on loneliness, intolerance of uncertainty and emotion estimation biases as potential predictors of elevated depression levels. During the general lockdown in April 2020, 551 participants reported their psychological health by means of various online questionnaires and an implicit task. Out of these participants, 129 took part in a second phase in June 2020. Subjective loneliness during the lockdown rather than objective isolation was the strongest predictor of symptoms of depression 5 weeks later. Younger age and health related worry also predicted higher non-clinical levels of depression and emotional distress. The results support the diathesis-stress model, which posits that a combination of preexisting vulnerabilities along with stressors such as negative life events are among the factors affecting the development of psychopathology. Moreover, our results correspond with those of previous studies conducted worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Taken together, these findings call for focusing on psychological factors, especially among younger people, to identify individuals at risk for future development of depression and to promote new strategies for prevention.

When twice is better than once: increased liking of repeated items influences memory in younger and older adults

BACKGROUND

Numerous studies have reported that the repeated presentation of a stimulus leads to an increase in positive affect towards the stimulus itself (the so-called mere exposure effect). Here, we evaluate whether changes in liking due to repetition may have a differential impact on subsequent memories in younger and older adults.

METHOD

In two experiments, younger and older adults were asked to rate a series of nonwords (Experiment 1) or unfamiliar neutral faces (Experiment 2) in terms of how much they like them and then presented with a surprise yes-no recognition memory task. At study, items were repeated either consecutively (massed presentation) or with a lag of 6 intervening items (spaced presentation).

RESULTS

In both experiments, participants rated spaced repeated items more positively than massed items, i.e. they liked them most. Moreover, older adults remembered spaced stimuli that they liked most better than younger adults.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings are discussed in accordance with the mechanisms underlying positivity effects in memory and the effect of repetition on memory encoding.

Performance Differences Between Native and Non-Native Speakers on a New Happy-Sad Executive Function Measure

OBJECTIVE

The happy-sad task adapts the classic day-night task by incorporating two early acquired emotional concepts ("happy" and "sad") and demonstrates elevated inhibitory demands for native speakers. The task holds promise as a new executive function measure for assessing inhibitory control across the lifespan, but no studies have examined the influence of language of test administration on performance.

METHOD

Seventy adult native English speakers and 50 non-native speakers completed the computerized day-night and the new happy-sad tasks administered in English. In two conditions, participants were categorized pictorial stimuli either in a congruent manner ("happy" for a happy face) or in a more challenging, incongruent manner ("sad" for a happy face). Lexical decision performance was obtained to estimate levels of English language proficiency.

RESULTS

Native speakers and non-native speakers performed comparably except for the critical incongruent condition of the happy-sad task, where native speakers responded more slowly. A greater congruency effect for the happy-sad task was found for native than for non-native speakers. Lexical decision performance was associated with performance on the challenging incongruent conditions.

CONCLUSION

This study reinforced the usefulness of the happy-sad task as a new measure in evaluating inhibitory control in adult native-speakers. However, the language of test administration needs to be considered in assessment because it may lead to performance differences between native and non-native speakers.

Artificial sounds following biological rules: A novel approach for non-verbal communication in HRI

Emotionally expressive non-verbal vocalizations can play a major role in human-robot interactions. Humans can assess the intensity and emotional valence of animal vocalizations based on simple acoustic features such as call length and fundamental frequency. These simple encoding rules are suggested to be general across terrestrial vertebrates. To test the degree of this generalizability, our aim was to synthesize a set of artificial sounds by systematically changing the call length and fundamental frequency, and examine how emotional valence and intensity is attributed to them by humans. Based on sine wave sounds, we generated sound samples in seven categories by increasing complexity via incorporating different characteristics of animal vocalizations. We used an online questionnaire to measure the perceived emotional valence and intensity of the sounds in a two-dimensional model of emotions. The results show that sounds with low fundamental frequency and shorter call lengths were considered to have a more positive valence, and samples with high fundamental frequency were rated as more intense across all categories, regardless of the sound complexity. We conclude that applying the basic rules of vocal emotion encoding can be a good starting point for the development of novel non-verbal vocalizations for artificial agents.

Oxytocin alters patterns of brain activity and amygdalar connectivity by age during dynamic facial emotion identification

Aging is associated with increased difficulty in facial emotion identification, possibly due to age-related network change. The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) facilitates emotion identification, but this is understudied in aging. To determine the effects of OT on dynamic facial emotion identification across adulthood, 46 young and 48 older participants self-administered intranasal OT or a placebo in a randomized, double-blind procedure. Older participants were slower and less accurate in identifying emotions. Although there was no behavioral treatment effect, partial least squares analysis supported treatment effects on brain patterns during emotion identification that varied by age and emotion. For young participants, OT altered the processing of sadness and happiness, whereas for older participants, OT only affected the processing of sadness (15.3% covariance, p = 0.004). Furthermore, seed partial least squares analysis showed that older participants in the OT group recruited a large-scale amygdalar network that was positively correlated for anger, fear, and happiness, whereas older participants in the placebo group recruited a smaller, negatively correlated network (7% covariance, p = 0.002). Advancing the literature, these findings show that OT alters brain activity and amygdalar connectivity by age and emotion.

Age differences in the use of emotion regulation strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation: a systematic review

OBJECTIVES

This review examines differences in the use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies among younger and older adults.

METHOD

A systematic review using search terms related to ageing and ER identified 23 relevant studies. Narrative synthesis was adopted to analyse the findings.

RESULTS

Generally, greater use of situation selection and attentional deployment was identified among older adults, although these relationships were dependent on contextual/moderator variables. While older adults employed greater levels of situation modification in response to negative stimuli, there was considerable variation in age differences across specific situation modification subtypes. Available evidence pointed to an absence of age differences in the cognitive change strategy of cognitive reappraisal. The use of relatively less-cognitively demanding cognitive change subtypes (e.g. acceptance) was, under particular circumstances, greater among older adults. Findings regarding the response modulation strategy of expressive suppression were equivocal.

CONCLUSION

Adult development is not characterised by straightforward shifts in preferences for use of different ER strategies. Moderator variables appear to be of central importance in shaping the emergence of age differences in ER. Systematically examining interactions of age with individual difference variables and situational factors in samples including oldest-old adults will be important for advancing knowledge regarding developmental differences in ER.

The same with age: Evidence for age-related similarities in interpersonal accuracy

Interpersonal accuracy refers to the ability to make accurate perceptions about others' social and emotional qualities. Despite this broad definition, the measurement of interpersonal accuracy remains narrow, as most studies focus on the accurate perception of others' emotional states. Moreover, previous research has relied primarily upon traditional tasks consisting of posed, prototypic expressions and behaviors as stimuli. These methodological limitations may constrain our understanding of how different interpersonal perception skills change in adulthood. The present study investigated the extent to which various interpersonal perception skills are worse, better, or remain the same with age using both traditional and nontraditional interpersonal accuracy tasks. One hundred fifty-one adults from 3 age groups (young, middle age, and older) completed a battery of interpersonal accuracy tasks that assessed eight different emotion perception skills and six different social perception skills. Analyses revealed age-related differences in accuracy for five interpersonal perception skills; differences were typically observed between younger and older adults on emotion perception accuracy and between younger and middle-age adults on social perception accuracy. In contrast, almost all remaining interpersonal perception skills-both emotional and social-revealed greater evidence for age-related similarities than differences in Bayesian analyses. Additional exploratory analyses indicated that the observed age differences in interpersonal accuracy may be attributable to individual differences in cognitive ability rather than age. Results provide a nuanced picture of how interpersonal perception skills change in adulthood and provide new methodological tools for a more complete and comprehensive assessment of interpersonal accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

When and where in aging: the role of music on source monitoring

Difficulties in source monitoring (SM) tasks observed in healthy older adults may be linked to associative memory deficits since SM requires individuals to correctly bind and later remember these bound features to discriminate the origin of a memory. Therefore, focusing attention on discriminating factors that may attenuate older adults' difficulties in attributing contextual information to memories is necessary. We investigated the effect of affective information on source monitoring in younger and older adults by manipulating the type of affective information (pictures and music) and assessing the ability to remember spatial and temporal source details for affective pictures encoded while listening to classical music. Older and younger adults viewed a series of affective IAPS pictures presented on the left or right side of the computer screen in two different lists. At test, participants were asked to remember if the picture was seen (right/left), in which list (list1/list2) or whether it was new. Results showed that spatial information was attributed better than temporal information and emotional pictures were attributed better than neutral pictures in both younger and older adults. In addition, although music significantly increased source memory performance in both younger and older participants compared to the white noise condition, the pleasantness of music differentially affected memory for source details. The authors discuss findings in terms of an interaction between music, emotion and cognition in aging.

Age-related differences in emotion matching are limited to low intensity expressions

Multi-label tasks confound age differences in perceptual and cognitive processes. We examined age differences in emotion perception with a technique that did not require verbal labels. Participants matched the emotion expressed by a target to two comparison stimuli, one neutral and one emotional. Angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and sad facial expressions of varying intensity were used. Although older adults took longer to respond than younger adults, younger adults only outmatched older adults for the lowest intensity disgust and fear expressions. Some participants also completed an identity matching task in which target stimuli were matched on personal identity instead of emotion. Although irrelevant to the judgment, expressed emotion still created interference. All participants were less accurate when the apparent difference in expressive intensity of the matched stimuli was large, suggesting that salient emotion cues increased difficulty of identity matching. Age differences in emotion perception were limited to very low intensity expressions.

Forming Facial Expressions Influences Assessment of Others' Dominance but Not Trustworthiness

Forming specific facial expressions influences emotions and perception. Bearing this in mind, studies should be reconsidered in which observers expressing neutral emotions inferred personal traits from the facial expressions of others. In the present study, participants were asked to make happy, neutral, and disgusted facial expressions: for "happy," they held a wooden chopstick in their molars to form a smile; for "neutral," they clasped the chopstick between their lips, making no expression; for "disgusted," they put the chopstick between their upper lip and nose and knit their brows in a scowl. However, they were not asked to intentionally change their emotional state. Observers judged happy expression images as more trustworthy, competent, warm, friendly, and distinctive than disgusted expression images, regardless of the observers' own facial expression. Observers judged disgusted expression images as more dominant than happy expression images. However, observers expressing disgust overestimated dominance in observed disgusted expression images and underestimated dominance in happy expression images. In contrast, observers with happy facial forms attenuated dominance for disgusted expression images. These results suggest that dominance inferred from facial expressions is unstable and influenced by not only the observed facial expression, but also the observers' own physiological states.

A New Standardized Emotional Film Database for Asian Culture

Researchers interested in emotions have endeavored to elicit emotional responses in the laboratory and have determined that films were one of the most effective ways to elicit emotions. The present study presented the development of a new standardized emotional film database for Asian culture. There were eight kinds of emotion: fear, disgust, anger, sadness, neutrality, surprise, amusement, and pleasure. Each kind included eight film clips, and a total of 64 emotional films were viewed by 110 participants. We analyzed both the subjective experience (valence, arousal, motivation, and dominance) and physiological response (heart rate and respiration rate) to the presentation of each film. The results of the subjective ratings indicated that our set of 64 films successfully elicited the target emotions. Heart rate declined while watching high-arousal films compared to neutral ones. Films that expressed amusement elicited the lowest respiration rate, whereas fear elicited the highest. The amount and category of emotional films in this database were considerable. This database may help researchers choose applicable emotional films for study according to their own purposes and help in studies of cultural differences in emotion.

Thin-Slice Measurement of Wisdom

Objective Measurement of Wisdom within a short period of time is vital for both the public interest (e.g., understanding a presidential election) and research (e.g., testing factors that facilitate wisdom development). A measurement of emotion associated with wisdom would be especially informative; therefore, a novel Thin-Slice measurement of wisdom was developed based on the Berlin Paradigm. For about 2 min, participants imagined the lens of a camera as the eyes of their friend/teacher whom they advised about a life dilemma. Verbal response and facial expression were both recorded by a camera: verbal responses were then rated on both the Berlin Wisdom criteria and newly developed Chinese wisdom criteria; facial expressions were analyzed by the software iMotion FACET module. Results showed acceptable inter-rater and inter-item reliability for this novel paradigm. Moreover, both wisdom ratings were not significantly correlated with Social desirability, and the Berlin wisdom rating was significantly negatively correlated with Neuroticism; feeling of surprise was significantly positively correlated with both wisdom criteria ratings. Our results provide the first evidence of this Thin-slice Wisdom Paradigm’s reliability, its immunity to social desirability, and its validity for assessing candidates’ wisdom within a short timeframe. Although still awaiting further development, this novel Paradigm contributes to an emerging Universal Wisdom Paradigm applicable across cultures.

Emotional prosody effects on verbal memory in older and younger adults

Prosody, or the way things are said, can modify the meaning of utterances making qualitatively different affective prosodies useful for understanding how auditory affective information is processed and remembered. In this study, we collected behavioral data from 225 younger (M age = 20.8 years, SD = 2.5 years; 119 males) and 225 older adults (M age = 71.6 years, SD = 6.5 years; 119 males) in order to examine age differences in emotional prosody effects on verbal memory. Participants were randomly divided into three subgroups according to different prosody listening conditions (positive, negative, and neutral) and prosody effects on a yes-no recognition memory task were investigated. The results showed how older adults who listened to the story read with a neutral prosody remembered more words than those who listened to the same story with a positive or negative prosody. Younger adults showed no valence effects. Our findings highlighted an age and affective prosody interaction that affects remembering in older adults alone.

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.

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.

Adaptation to Complex Pictures: Exposure to Emotional Valence Induces Assimilative Aftereffects

Aftereffects have been documented for a variety of perceptual categories spanning from body gender to facial emotion, thus becoming an important tool in the study of high-level vision and its neural bases. We examined whether the perceived valence of a complex scene is subject to aftereffects, by observing the participants’ evaluation of the valence of a test picture preceded by a different picture. For this study, we employed an adaptation paradigm with positive and negative images used as adapters, and positive, negative, and neutral images used as tests. Our results show that adaptation to complex emotional pictures induces assimilative aftereffects: participants judged neutral tests more positively following positive adapters and more negatively following negative adapters. This depended on the prolonged adaptation phase (10 s), as the results of a second experiment, in which adapters lasted for 500 ms, did not show aftereffects. In addition, the results show that assimilative aftereffects of negative and positive adapters also manifested themselves on non-neutral (negative and positive) targets, providing evidence that the global emotional content of complex pictures is suitable to induce assimilative aftereffects.

Fighting apathy in Alzheimer's dementia: A brief emotional-based intervention

Lack of motivation, or apathy, is a clinically significant feature among dementia patients. The current study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a brief emotional shaping intervention developed to reduce apathy and increase willingness-to-do in Alzheimer's Dementia patients. To this end, 26 Alzheimer patients diagnosed with apathy according to the Apathy Evaluation Scale (AES, Marin et al.,1991) and 26 healthy older controls performed an emotional shaping task intended to unconsciously foster willingness-to-do. Participants were randomly assigned to either a positive or a neutral conditioning situation. Results showed how the positively conditioned group was associated with improved willingness-to-do in both patients and controls compared to the neutrally conditioned group. Our findings suggest that unconscious emotional processing can be used to treat apathy symptoms and increase willingness-to-do in Alzheimer's Dementia.

Emotional Meta-Memories: A Review

Emotional meta-memory can be defined as the knowledge people have about the strategies and monitoring processes that they can use to remember their emotionally charged memories. Although meta-memory per se has been studied in many cognitive laboratories for many years, fewer studies have explicitly focused on meta-memory for emotionally charged or valenced information. In this brief review, we analyzed a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies that used different meta-memory tasks with valenced information in order to foster new research in this direction, especially in terms of commonalities/peculiarities of the emotion and meta-memory interaction. In addition, results further support meta-cognitive models that take emotional factors into account when defining meta-memory per se.