Changes in Posed Facial Expression of Emotion Across the Adult Life Span

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in the facial expression of emotion across the adult life span. Two positive and two negative emotional expressions were posed by 30 young (21 to 39 years), 30 middle-aged (40 to 59 years), and 30 older (60 to 81 years) healthy, right-handed women. Photographs of the four emotional expressions were rated by independent judges for intensity, accuracy, and confidence. Special features of this study were the use of a neutral face as a nonemotional control, as well as careful cognitive and affective screening procedures for posers and judges. Overall, the expressions of older posers were rated as significantly less accurate and with significantly less confidence than those of younger posers. Although the neutral faces of older posers were rated as significantly more intense than those of younger posers, there were no significant age-related intensity differences for positive and negative emotions. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical models of aging.

This study is based, in part, on doctoral dissertations completed by Sandra A. Yecker at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) and by Caridad R. Moreno at New York University. Portions of this article were presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society in Denver, CO, February 2000, and at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Boston, MA, August 1999. This research was supported, in part, by NIMH grants MH37952 and MH42172, Professional Staff Congress–CUNY Research Awards 663432 and 667515, and Biomedical Research Support Grant RR07064.

Notes

¹Even though we realize that the resting face is not technically an expression, for ease of communication, we refer to it as an expression or a pose throughout the text.

²Three age groups of raters were used in light of literature suggesting that cohort bias can affect judgments of facial emotional expressions (Malatesta et al., 1987). By cohort bias, we refer to a perceptual advantage for processing emotional cues in same-aged peers. This feature of our design permitted an exploration of whether different rater age groups would evaluate emotional expressions differentially as a function of poser age.

³The five sets of stimuli were bound to an 8 by 10-inch easel for presentation to the raters. The easels had a grayish-white background selected for its contrast and reflection of the black and white stimuli. This form of presentation was used so that the facial expressions would be viewed in a near vertical plain that could be equated to en face viewing. The easel also precluded looking down upon the materials and helped to equate visual angle among raters.

∗Interrater concordance was calculated for the accuracy rating.

∗Each range includes 12 correlation coefficients (i.e., 4 emotional expressions × 3 dependent variables).

⁴Of note, both positive and negative emotions showed significant left-sided facial asymmetry, reflecting right-hemisphere superiority, across the three poser age groups. Thus, no support was provided for the valence hypothesis (for reviews, see Ali & Cimino, 1997; Borod & Madigan, 2000), which posits right-hemisphere mediation for negative emotions and left-hemisphere mediation for positive emotions.

∗Accuracy scores are log odds scores and were logit transformed.

⁵Analysis of variance revealed a significant difference among the age groups, F (2, 87) = 4.16, p < .05, such that older posers (M = 33.9 ± 7.1) exhibited more depressive symptomatology than did middle-aged (M = 30.4 ± 7.2) or young (M = 29.3 ± 5.0) posers. Subsequent correlations between the depression scores and the three expression total scores under study did not yield any significant findings across poser age groups (median r = − .03, range = − .30 to + .16).

⁶Two-way ANOVAs were performed to assess the effects of poser age (3) and emotion type (4) on the difficulty and intensity ratings. A significant interaction between age and emotion for difficulty occurred F(6, 261) = 2.06, p < .05, such that young posers had more difficulty with disgust and sadness, and middle-aged posers had more difficulty with surprise than did the other poser groups. There also was a significant interaction for intensity, F(6, 261) = 2.25, p < .05, such that older posers experienced surprise with less intensity and young posers experienced sadness and disgust with less intensity than did the other poser groups.