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Age Differences in Emotion Recognition Skills and the Visual Scanning of Emotion Faces

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 18:36 authored by Susan Sullivan, Ted Ruffman, Samuel B Hutton
Research suggests that a person's emotion recognition declines with advancing years. We examined whether or not this age-related decline was attributable to a tendency to overlook emotion information in the eyes. In Experiment 1, younger adults were significantly better than older adults at inferring emotions from full faces and eyes, though not from mouths. Using an eye tracker in Experiment 2, we found young adults, in comparison with older adults, to have superior emotion recognition performance and to look proportionately more to eyes than mouths. However, although better emotion recognition performance was significantly correlated with more eye looking in younger adults, the same was not true in older adults. We discuss these results in terms of brain changes with age.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Journals of Gerontology, Series B

ISSN

1758-5368

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Issue

1

Volume

62

Page range

53-60

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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