The impact of emotional congruent and emotional neutral context on recognizing complex emotions in older adults

ABSTRACT

Adding context information has been shown to attenuate the age-related decline of emotion recognition. Specifically, older adults might benefit from emotional congruent context information due to their greater social knowledge. Contrary, emotional neutral context information might impair older adults’ performance more due to their decline of inhibitory abilities. Our aim was to examine the age-related decline of complex emotion recognition across three context conditions (emotional congruent, emotional neutral and no context). We hypothesized that emotional congruent context will help older adults to perform at the same level as younger adults and expected worse performance of older adults in the emotional neutral and no context conditions. Twenty-eight older and 28 younger adults watched film clips with complex emotions preceded by a fixation cross (no context), emotional congruent context or emotional neutral context. Emotional neutral context affected older adults’ performance more negatively than young adults’, whereas emotional congruent improved performance of both young and older adults to a similar extent. Results suggest that emotional congruent context does not eliminate the overall age-related deficit in complex emotion recognition. In contrast, this deficit might be intensified by emotional neutral context.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• emotion recognition
• complex emotion
• context
• congruency

Acknowledgments

We thank Miriam-Sophie Petasch and Eva Reichel for their help regarding references, Figures, and Tables.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Authors contribution statement

JM and SW carried out the data acquisition. NV, JM, and SW performed the data analysis. NV and JM drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed to the experimental design of the study, were involved in the interpretation of data, revised the manuscript critically, approved the submitted version to be published, and hold themselves accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work were appropriately investigated and resolved.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Grant VE 892/2-1, 290210763, and SFB 940/1, the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung under Grant BMBF 01EV0711; and the Faculty of Medicine at the Technische Universität Dresden under the MeDDrive Grant.