The perception of emotions shown by the elderly
This project investigates how emotion expressions shown by the elderly
are perceived and reacted to by younger individuals. The communication
of emotions between the elderly and younger individuals has largely
been studied by focusing on the ability of the elderly to understand
the emotions expressed by younger individuals with an almost complete
neglect of the converse process. However, emotion communication is a
two way process and only if both parties are able to understand each
other can the process proceed smoothly.
Extant research is limited but suggests that decoding accuracy varies
with age congruence between encoder and decoder. As well, the affective
expressions of older individuals may be harder to decode owing to
age-related structural changes in the face. In addition, age related
stereotypes can bias the perception of ambiguous expressions shown by
the elderly. In fact, recent research in our laboratory shows that when
identical emotion expressions are shown by young and old individuals
they are rated as equal in overall intensity. However, the expressions
shown by the older individuals are rated as weaker on the intended
emotion and higher on other, unrelated, emotions. For example, happy
expressions when shown by the elderly were rated as less happy, but
also as more fearful, angry and sad. This suggests that the age related
changes in the face "confuse" raters as to the emotion expressed, thus
they perceive additional emotion information. Additional ratings when
images were filtered to reduce the impact of wrinkles while still
allowing the identification of the face as young or old suggested an
additional impact of stereotype information. Together, these findings
suggest that facial expressions shown by the elderly are subject to
interpretative bias. This bias seems to also impact on mimicry
reactions to expressions by the elderly.
Simard, A., Stevenson, M. T., Adams, R. B. Jr., Kleck, R., Hess, U.
(2010). L'influence des stéréotypes liés à l'âge et au genre sur la
perception des emotions. Poster accepted for the 31st congrès annuel de
la Société québécoise pour la recherche en psychologie Montreal, Qc,
March, 19-21.
Lasalle, M. Simard, A., & Hess, U. (2009). Will you still mimic me
when I am 64? Mimicry of older faces. Poster presented at the
49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research,
Berlin, October 21-24.