title: The specificity of age-related decline in interpretation of emotion cues from prosody.
abstract: Older adults are not as good as younger adults at decoding prosodic emotions. We sought to determine the specificity of this finding. Performance of older and younger adults was compared on a prosodic emotion task, a "pure" prosodic emotion task, a linguistic prosody task, and a "pure" linguistic prosody task. Older adults were less accurate at interpreting prosodic emotion cues and nonemotional contours, concurrent semantic processing worsened interpretation, and performance was further degraded when identifying negative emotions and questions. Older adults display a pervasive problem interpreting prosodic cues, but further study is required to clarify the stage at which performance declines.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Durham University, Science Site, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE. r.l.c.mitchell@dur.ac.uk
authors.forename: Rachel L C
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Mitchell
authors.forename: Rachel A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Kingston
authors.forename: Sofia L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Barbosa Bouças
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D003463:Cues; D056348:Emotional Intelligence; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007361:Intelligence Tests; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D012938:Social Perception; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult