Facial expression recognition across the adult life span.
We report three experiments investigating the recognition of emotion from facial expressions across the adult life span. Increasing age produced a progressive reduction in the recognition of fear and, to a lesser extent, anger. In contrast, older participants showed no reduction in recognition of disgust, rather there was some evidence of an improvement. The results are discussed in terms of studies from the neuropsychological and functional imaging literature that indicate that separate brain regions may underlie the emotions fear and disgust. We suggest that the dissociable effects found for fear and disgust are consistent with the differential effects of ageing on brain regions involved in these emotions.
Calder
Andrew J
AJ
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK. andy.calder@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Keane
Jill
J
Manly
Tom
T
Sprengelmeyer
Reiner
R
Scott
Sophie
S
Nimmo-Smith
Ian
I
Young
Andrew W
AW
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D000679:Amygdala / Q000502:physiology; D000786:Anger / Q000502:physiology; D001479:Basal Ganglia / Q000502:physiology; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D012919:Social Behavior