Face Age and Eye Gaze Influence Older Adults’ Emotion Recognition

Anna Campbell, Janice E. Murray, Lianne Atkinson and Ted Ruffman

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2017, vol. 72, issue 4, 633-636

Abstract: Objectives:Eye gaze has been shown to influence emotion recognition. In addition, older adults (over 65 years) are not as influenced by gaze direction cues as young adults (18–30 years). Nevertheless, these differences might stem from the use of young to middle-aged faces in emotion recognition research because older adults have an attention bias toward old-age faces. Therefore, using older face stimuli might allow older adults to process gaze direction cues to influence emotion recognition.Method:To investigate this idea, young and older adults completed an emotion recognition task with young and older face stimuli displaying direct and averted gaze, assessing labeling accuracy for angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and sad faces.Results:Direct gaze rather than averted gaze improved young adults’ recognition of emotions in young and older faces, but for older adults this was true only for older faces.Discussion:The current study highlights the impact of stimulus face age and gaze direction on emotion recognition in young and older adults. The use of young face stimuli with direct gaze in most research might contribute to age-related emotion recognition differences.

Keywords: Aging; Emotion recognition; Gaze direction; Own-age bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbv114 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:72:y:2017:i:4:p:633-636.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().