Age-group differences in interference from young and older emotional faces

Abstract

Human attention is selective, focusing on some aspects of events at the expense of others. In particular, angry faces engage attention. Most studies have used pictures of young faces, even when comparing young and older age groups. Two experiments asked: (1) whether task-irrelevant faces of young and older individuals with happy, angry, and neutral expressions disrupt performance on a face-unrelated task; (2) whether interference varies for faces of different ages and different facial expressions; and (3) whether young and older adults differ in this regard. Participants gave speeded responses on a number task while irrelevant faces appeared in the background. Both age groups were more distracted by own- than other-age faces. In addition, young participants' responses were slower with angry than happy faces, whereas older participants' responses were slower with happy than angry faces in the background. Factors underlying age-group differences in interference from emotional faces of different ages are discussed.

Keywords:

• Interference
• Attention bias
• Own-age bias
• Emotion
• Facial expression

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted at Yale University and supported by the National Institute on Aging Grant AG09253 awarded to MKJ and by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG EB 436/1–1) awarded to NCE.

The authors wish to thank the Yale Cognition Project group for discussions of the studies reported in this paper, Kathleen Muller and William Hwang for assistance in data collection, and Carol L. Raye for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

¹When asked to indicate the extent of distraction by the faces, participants reported to have been somewhat distracted by the faces (M = 2.73, SD = 0.15), with the majority of participants indicating that young faces were more distracting than older faces and that angry faces were more distracting than happy or neutral faces. This suggests some participant insight into face-interference effects.

²With the exception of one older female participant, who had contacted the lab independently for study participation, dementia screening for older participants had taken place between one to two years earlier in the context of participants’ entry into the lab's participant pool.

³In Experiment 2 we found little participant insight into face-interference effects. The majority of both age groups reported no difference in distraction by young and older faces and no difference in interference from happy, angry, or neutral faces. Some of the young participants reported more interference from angry than happy or neutral faces.

⁴To our knowledge, the present study is the first that examined age-group differences on the MSIT. It shows that young and especially older participants responded more slowly on difficult than on easy trials. Note, however, that we shortened the stimulus presentation time (1000 ms instead of 1750 ms in the original version of the task; Bush et al., 2003) and added faces as an additional potential source of interference.