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The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences Advance Access originally published online on October 5, 2009
The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 2009 64B(6):696-703; doi:10.1093/geronb/gbp072
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Recognition of Facial, Auditory, and Bodily Emotions in Older Adults

Ted Ruffman, Jamin Halberstadt and Janice Murray

Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Address correspondence to Ted Ruffman, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. Email: tedr{at}psy.otago.ac.nz


  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.

Key Words: Bodily expressions • Emotion recognition • Facial expressions • Older adults • Vocal expressions

Received November 3, 2008; Accepted July 27, 2009

Decision Editor: Rosemary Blieszner, PhD


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