Older adults have difficulty decoding emotions from the eyes, whereas easterners have difficulty decoding emotion from the mouth

Abstract

Older adults and Easterners have worse emotion recognition (than young adults and Westerners, respectively), but the question of why remains unanswered. Older adults look less at eyes, whereas Easterners look less at mouths, raising the possibility that compelling older adults to look at eyes, and Easterners to look at mouths, might improve recognition. We did this by comparing emotion recognition in 108 young adults and 109 older adults from New Zealand and Singapore in the (a) eyes on their own (b) mouth on its own or (c) full face. Older adults were worse than young adults on 4/6 emotions with the Eyes Only stimuli, but only 1/6 emotions with the Mouth Only stimuli. In contrast, Easterners were worse than Westerners on 6/6 emotions for Mouth Only and Full Face stimuli, but were equal on all six emotions for Eyes Only stimuli. These results provide a substantial leap forward because they point to the precise difficulty for older adults and Easterners. Older adults have more consistent difficulty identifying individual emotions in the eyes compared to the mouth, likely due to declining brain functioning, whereas Easterners have more consistent difficulty identifying emotions from the mouth than the eyes, likely due to inexperience inferring mouth information.

Figure 1

Number of prior studies indicating gaze tendencies at particular face regions in Easterners and Westerners. Note. X: Westerners, O: Easterners. For example, three prior studies indicate substantial looking at the nose by Easterners, whereas three studies indicate substantial looking at the mouth by Westerners. The figure shows that looking is more widely distributed across the face for Westerners compared to Easterners.

Figure 2

Young and older adults’ emotion recognition when shown the eyes, mouth or full face. Note. Bars represent standard errors. Relative to young adults, older adults had more consistent difficulty on the Eyes Only stimuli than the Mouth Only stimuli. For the Eyes Only stimuli, older adults were worse than young adults on anger, sadness, fear and happiness. For the Mouth Only stimuli, older adults were worse only on sadness.

Figure 3

Easterners’ and Westerners’ emotion recognition when shown the eyes, mouth or full face. Note. Bars represent standard errors. There was no difference in the emotion recognition of Easterners and Westerners on the Eyes Only stimuli. In contrast, Easterners were worse on all six emotions of the Mouth Only stimuli and the same was true for the Full Face stimuli.