Older adults’ emotion recognition: No auditory-visual benefit for less clear expressions

Abstract

The ability to recognise emotion from faces or voices appears to decline with advancing age. However, some studies have shown that emotion recognition of auditory-visual (AV) expressions is largely unaffected by age, i.e., older adults get a larger benefit from AV presentation than younger adults resulting in similar AV recognition levels. An issue with these studies is that they used well-recognised emotional expressions that are unlikely to generalise to real-life settings. To examine if an AV emotion recognition benefit generalizes across well and less well recognised stimuli, we conducted an emotion recognition study using expressions that had clear or unclear emotion information for both modalities, or clear visual, but unclear auditory information. Older (n = 30) and younger (n = 30) participants were tested on stimuli of anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, and disgust (expressed in spoken sentences) in auditory-only (AO), visual-only (VO), or AV format. Participants were required to respond by choosing one of 5 emotion options. Younger adults were more accurate in recognising emotions than older adults except for clear VO expressions. Younger adults showed an AV benefit even when unimodal recognition was poor. No such AV benefit was found for older adults; indeed, AV was worse than VO recognition when AO recognition was poor. Analyses of confusion responses indicated that older adults generated more confusion responses that were common between AO and VO conditions, than younger adults. We propose that older adults’ poorer AV performance may be due to a combination of weak auditory emotion recognition and response uncertainty that resulted in a higher cognitive load.