Has the Elderly's Emotional Perception Ability Deteriorated? Query, Evidence and Analysis

Ding Xiaobin; Kang Tiejun; Wang Rui; Zhao Jing

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230619

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2023, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (6) : 1425-1431. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230619

Social，Personality & Organizational Psychology

Has the Elderly's Emotional Perception Ability Deteriorated? Query, Evidence and Analysis

Ding Xiaobin, Kang Tiejun, Wang Rui, Zhao Jing

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Abstract

Whether the increase of age will lead to the decline of emotional perception in the elderly? Previous studies believe that, compared to young adults, the elderly have lower performance in recognizing negative facial expressions such as fear and anger, and the ability of the elderly to recognize emotions decreases with age. However, a large number of studies in recent years have failed to replicate similar age effects of emotional perception, and have even shown the opposite conclusion that the emotional recognition ability of the elderly does not decrease significantly with age. Several current studies have found that: First, the age difference in the recognition of negative emotions may be exaggerated, and when recognizing facial expressions of fear, sadness, disgust, and happiness, the difference between the elderly and the young people may be further reduced or not significant. Second, when body expressions and facial expressions are presented at the same time, compared to young adults, the recognition of facial expressions of the elderly is more easily affected by the body expressions. Thirdly, although the elderly are impaired when recognizing emotions in a single channel (face or voice), the age difference is eliminated when recognizing cross-channel emotions, and elderly benefit from consistent multi-sensory emotional integration processing. The reasons for many inconsistent conclusions may lie in following considerations. (1) The continuous expansion of the concept of emotional perception, from the early research mainly focused on “emotional faces” to the “face-voice” or “face-body” emotional integration that the current researchers are interested in, and concept extension has led to the controversy over the "aging" of emotion recognition ability. (2) It may be related to confusion between visual processing preference and emotional face processing strategy. (3) Selected reflecting indicators are more sensitive to age changes and are more susceptible to the decline abilities of cognitive processing and attention in the elderly, which to some extent aggravate the age difference of emotion recognition. The motivation of the elderly is different in different experimental task conditions. That is, the closer the experimental task is to the real life phenomenon, the easier it may be to mobilize the motivation of the elderly subjects to participate in the experimental task. So the differences in task performance between the elderly and the young people is smaller. According to the theory of social cognitive function, social individuals continue to accumulate social perception experience throughout their lives, and their expertise (or skills) of social interaction is also increasing. The focus of social professional knowledge theory is not the traditional accuracy itself, but the sensitivity and selectivity to relevant clues in the social field. The elderly may use different rules and strategies in the process of social perception. In the future, more ecological stimuli and comprehensive indicators should be used to evaluate the emotion recognition ability of the elderly, to pay attention to the impact and mechanism of cognitive ability on emotion recognition of the elderly, and to reflect the development and changes of interpersonal accuracy with more comprehensive indicators.

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emotion identification / facial expression / body expression / age difference / interpersonal accuracy

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Ding Xiaobin, Kang Tiejun, Wang Rui, Zhao Jing. Has the Elderly's Emotional Perception Ability Deteriorated? Query, Evidence and Analysis[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2023, 46(6): 1425-1431 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230619

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