Age differences in emotion recognition: the task matters

Abstract

Objectives: This study examined the impact of context information on emotion recognition from a life-span developmental perspective. The main prediction was that age-related deficits in emotion recognition will only be evident in context-poor tasks.

Methods: A sample of 48 younger (M(age) = 23 years) and 35 older women (M(age) = 70 years) watched 48 film clips, each depicting a female target who talked about an emotional biographical episode and expressed one of three target emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, or anger). Half of the films were presented without sound (context-poor condition) and the other half was presented with sound (context-rich condition).

Results: Independent of the condition, younger women were better at recognizing sadness and anger than older women. However, the condition had an effect on age differences in happiness recognition: Age-related deficits were only evident in the context-poor condition. In addition, we found that logical reasoning predicted individual differences and age-related differences in sadness and anger recognition but not in happiness recognition.

Discussion: The present findings suggest that age differences in emotion recognition are context and emotion specific. Together, the evidence speaks for substantial plasticity in emotion recognition (i.e., within-person variability) well into old age.