Facial expression recognition in the elderly

Abstract

The ability to recognize facial expressions of emotions has been argued to play an important role in social communication. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the investigation of age-related changes in the ability for facial expression recognition. A majority of the aging-related studies on facial expression recognition utilized photographs of prototypical facial expressions of basic emotions as test stimuli, reporting differential age-related changes in the ability to recognize different emotions. However, the difficulty levels for the recognition of these prototypical facial expressions differ substantially across different emotions. Consequently, the differential agerelated changes observed in earlier studies may have been confounded by such differential difficulty levels. Therefore, this study utilized a novel test for facial expression recognition, in which the difficulty levels were fully controlled by means of morphing and item response theory. This test aims to provide an unbiased description of age-related changes in facial expression recognition. A comparison of the test scores of the old and young participants with regard to facial expression recognition revealed an age-related improvement in the recognition of happiness and an age-related deterioration in the recognition of other basic emotions, in particular, anger, among the old participants. These results indicated the possibility of age-related variation in the capacity for recognizing facial expressions that vary between happiness and other basic emotions. The mechanisms underlying the differential age-related changes are discussed in terms of neurological and socio-developmental perspectives.