OBSERVING DYNAMIC EMOTIONAL FACES FROM MANY GENERATIONS

This study sought to further understand emotion perception capabilities in younger and older adults. Previous studies examining emotion perception have consistently found emotion recognition deficits with age. The most common technique used to investigate age differences in emotion perception is a label selection task that presents static images of actors expressing emotion. More recently, dynamic stimuli have been developed; they portray realistic facial expressions that are more comparable to what one sees in real life. The use of dynamic stimuli has been found to ameliorate most age differences in the recognition of basic emotion categories. The current study presented dynamic expressions to participants in two different forms of emotion perception tasks. First, participants freely labeled dynamic stimuli, and then they selected one label that best captured each dynamic stimulus. Free labeling allows participants to authentically state what they perceive in the stimuli, whereas label selection provides an objective assessment of emotion perception that maps on to prior studies given the normed categories for the stimulus set. Participants observed dynamic emotion expressions of men and women actors that were part of their own age group as well as men and women actors who were outside of their own age group. We hypothesized the presence of age differences in participant accuracy in the label selection task and an occurrence of age congruence across tasks, such that participants would choose more accurate emotions for stimuli in their own age group rather than stimuli in other age groups. We also predicted that advancing age may be linked to the use of more complex emotion labels as well as the possibility that, regardless of age, people would describe the emotional state of same age peers with greater complexity than different age peers. We found minimal age differences across tasks and a lack of age congruence across tasks as well. However, we did observe that the age of the actor consistently affected participants’ label selection accuracy, free label complexity, and free label relevance. More specifically, participants were less accurate at recognizing emotions like anger and sadness in older actors, and the labels participants used were more complex for these emotions, but less relevant. Overall, these findings suggest that older emoters may offer weaker or more obscure cues to their feelings, leading observers to offer more complex descriptions that attempt to broadly capture multiple emotions or more subtle affective states.