Abstract
There is evidence that older adults have difficulty processing negative but not
positive facial expressions. This positivity effect among older adults is
expressed in attention to as well as in memory and recognition of emotional
faces. In the present thesis, effects of stimulus properties (i.e., self ratings of
valence, arousal, potency), context, and visual exploration were investigated.
In Study I, the aim was to investigate a happy face advantage seen in younger
adults’ recognition and detection of facial expressions. Two recognition tasks
showed that happy faces were better recognized than fearful and neutral faces.
In addition, this superior effect was evident in early processing, indicating that
happiness is an exceptional expression that is distinguished from other facial
expressions. The objective of Study II was to investigate effects of age on
subjective emotional impression (in terms of valence, arousal and potency) of
angry and happy faces, and to examine whether any age differences were
mirrored in measures of emotional behavior (attention, categorical perception,
and memory). The results demonstrated that older adults perceived less arousal,
potency, and valence than younger adults and that these differences were more
pronounced for angry than happy faces. This was mirrored in larger age
differences in attention, memory, and categorical perception for angry
compared to happy faces. In Study III the aim was to investigate how
linguistic context (i.e., written emotional labels) might reduce semantic
confusability, and thereby facilitate facial expression recognition. The results
showed that older adults were more reliant on linguistic context. Older and
younger adults’ visual exploration patterns were investigated in Study IV.
Results showed that older adults spent proportionally more time attending to
the mouth than to the eyes, which might explain their relatively lower
recognition of fear, anger and sadness, but maintained happiness and disgust
recognition.
In sum, subjective impression (i.e., arousal, potency), context, and visual
exploration patterns interact with adult age and should be considered in research
on effects of aging on facial expression processing.
