Research article summary (published 3 Oct 2009):

Recognition of facial, auditory, and bodily emotions in older adults.

Full Abstract

Understanding older adults' social functioning difficulties requires insight into their recognition of emotion processing in voices and bodies, not just faces, the focus of most prior research. We examined 60 young and 61 older adults' recognition of basic emotions in facial, vocal, and bodily expressions, and when matching faces and bodies to voices, using 120 emotion items. Older adults were worse than young adults in 17 of 30 comparisons, with consistent difficulties in recognizing both positive (happy) and negative (angry and sad) vocal and bodily expressions. Nearly three quarters of older adults functioned at a level similar to the lowest one fourth of young adults, suggesting that age-related changes are common. In addition, we found that older adults' difficulty in matching emotions was not explained by difficulty on the component sources (i.e., faces or voices on their own), suggesting an additional problem of integration.

Author information

Author/s: Ruffman, Ted (T); Halberstadt, Jamin (J); Murray, Janice (J);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. tedr(-atsign-)psy.otago.ac.nz

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences (J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Nov; vol 64 (issue 6) : pp 696-703

Dates: Created 2009/10/19; Completed 2009/10/27;

PMID: 19805486, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 10/27/2009, IMS Date: )

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adolescent Adult Aged Aged, 80 and over Aging - psychology Comprehension Discrimination (Psychology) Emotions Facial Expression Female Humans

Humans Male Middle Aged Nonverbal Communication Pattern Recognition, Visual Personal Construct Theory Reference Values Speech Acoustics Speech Perception Voice Young Adult

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