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.

Key words: emotion identification, facial expression, body expression, age difference, interpersonal accuracy

摘要： 年龄的增加是否导致老年人情绪识别能力的下降,研究者们对于这一问题的看法不尽相同。对比分析发现, 在诸如动态情绪识别、具有丰富背景信息、跨通道的情绪整合等更具生态化的研究中, 老年人并未表现出明显的情绪识别能力衰退。“年龄增加导致情绪识别能力衰退”这一结论的合理性有一定的范围和边界, 研究者在使用这一结论时还需谨慎。实验任务类型的变化,视觉加工偏好与情绪面孔加工策略的混淆,选择的反映指标对年龄变化更敏感,和不同任务下老年人的动机差异等因素可能导致了当前这一主题的研究存在诸多不一致的结论。鉴于此,今后的研究应考察老年人情绪知觉加工特点,关注认知能力对老年人情绪识别的影响与机制,考虑更加广泛的人际感知技能评估。

关键词: 情绪识别, 面部表情, 躯体表情, 年龄差异, 人际准确性