Exploring the Cognitive Processes Causing the Age-Related Categorization Deficit in the Recognition of Facial Expressions

Abstract

Background/Study Context: Elderly people do not categorize emotional facial expressions as accurately as younger people, particularly negative emotions. Although age-related impairments in decoding emotions in facial expressions are well documented, the causes of this deficit are poorly understood. This study examined the potential mechanisms that account for this age-related categorization deficit by assessing its dependence on presentation time.

Methods: Thirty young (19–27 years old) and 31 older (68–78 years old) Chinese adults were asked to categorize the six basic emotions in facial expressions, each presented for 120, 200, 600, or 1000 ms, before and after exposure to a neutral facial expression.

Results: Shortened presentation times caused an age-related deficit in the recognition of happy faces, whereas no deficit was observed at longer exposure times. An age-related deficit was observed for all negative emotions but was not exacerbated by shorter presentation times.

Conclusion: Age-related deficits in categorization of positive and negative emotions are caused by different mechanisms. Because negative emotions are perceptually similar, they cause high categorization demands. Elderly people may need more evidence in favor of the target emotion than younger people, and they make mistakes if this surplus of evidence is missing. In contrast, perceptually distinct happy faces were easily identified, and elderly people only failed when the presentation time was too short for their slower perceptual processing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank Balázs Fehér, Wen-Jing Yan, and Yu-Hsin Chen for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

FUNDING

This project was supported by the National Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2011CB302201); National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61075042 and 31371031); and the German Research Foundation Research Grant DFG (IRTG 1457).

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Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the National Basic Research Program (973) of China (No. 2011CB302201); National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61075042 and 31371031); and the German Research Foundation Research Grant DFG (IRTG 1457).