Sex differences in facial emotion perception ability across the lifespan

ABSTRACT

Perception of emotion in the face is a key component of human social cognition and is considered vital for many domains of life; however, little is known about how this ability differs across the lifespan for men and women. We addressed this question with a large community sample (N = 100,257) of persons ranging from younger than 15 to older than 60 years of age. Participants were viewers of the television show “Tout le Monde Joue”, and the task was presented on television, with participants responding via their mobile devices. Applying latent variable modeling, and establishing measurement invariance between males and females and across age, we found that, for both males and females, emotion perception abilities peak between the ages of 15 and 30, with poorer performance by younger adults and declining performance after the age of 30. In addition, we show a consistent advantage by females across the lifespan, which decreases in magnitude with increasing age. This large scale study with a wide range of people and testing environments suggests these effects are largely robust. Implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion perception
• emotion recognition
• sex differences
• aging
• latent variable modeling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Improvement over the course of the task, assessed by subtracting average performance on items 1–6 from average performance on items 7–10, was essentially unrelated with age (Men: r = .03, p < .001; Women: r = .02, p < .001), suggesting younger people did not benefit more from the verbal feedback, relative to older adults.

2 Based on a modification of equation 1.6 from Fleiss, 1986, p. 5, and incorporating the standard equation that the sample size needed is that estimated by the power analysis (N) divided by the reliability estimate (R).

3 Unbiased hit rate scoring was also inappropriate, given only 10 items were administered and there was an insufficient number of items from which to identify person-specific patterns of responding.