What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander: age and gender differences in scanning emotion faces

OBJECTIVES: Research indicates that older adults’ (= 60 years) emotion recognition is worse than that of young adults, young and older men’s emotion recognition is worse than that of young and older women (respectively), older adults’ looking at mouths compared to eyes is greater than that of young adults. Nevertheless, previous research has not compared older men’s and women’s looking at emotion faces so the present study had two aims: (1) to examine whether the tendency to look at mouths is stronger amongst older men compared to older women, and (2) to examine whether men’s mouth looking correlates with better emotion recognition. METHOD: We examined the emotion recognition abilities, and spontaneous gaze patterns of young (n = 60) and older (n = 58) males and females as they labelled emotion faces. RESULTS: Older men spontaneously looked more to mouths than older women, and older men’s looking at mouths correlated with their emotion recognition, whereas women’s looking at eyes correlated with their emotion recognition. DISCUSSION: The findings are discussed in relation to a growing body of research suggesting both age and gender differences in response to emotional stimuli, and the differential efficacy of mouth and eyes looking for men and women.