Age and sex-related systematic bias in the identification of affective messages

Abstract

The effects of age and sex on the ability to identify the emotion portrayed in videotaped affectively loaded sentences were investigated in 60 normal adults divided into three age groups. Sentence stimuli were either (1) affectively congruent, wherein extralinguistic features agreed with the literal sentence content; or (2) affectively ambiguous in which extralinguistic features did not agree with the literal sentence content. Statistical analyses revealed no significant effects of age or gender on the ability to correctly identify affect, but participants demonstrated significantly better performance in an audio–video compared with an audio-only condition. Analysis of ratios reflecting a systematic bias, determined from correct responses to the ambiguous sentences, suggested that with increasing age and particularly for males, responses more frequently are based on literal rather than extralinguistic features of the stimulus. Whereas younger subjects, and particularly female subjects, rely more heavily on paralinguistic information when identifying affective content of utterances, results suggest that with aging there is a change in strategies for processing emotional stimuli.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Age
• Sex
• Affect identification
• Brain damage

Acknowledgments

Part of this paper is adapted from a presentation at the Clinical Aphasiology Conference that was included in the proceedings of the meeting. Dr Malcolm McNeil, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Archivist for the Clinical Aphasiology Conference, has granted permission for use of the adapted tables in this paper.