Age-related decline in emotional prosody discrimination: acoustic correlates.
It is now accepted that older adults have difficulty recognizing prosodic emotion cues, but it is not clear at what processing stage this ability breaks down. We manipulated the acoustic characteristics of tones in pitch, amplitude, and duration discrimination tasks to assess whether impaired basic auditory perception coexisted with our previously demonstrated age-related prosodic emotion perception impairment. It was found that pitch perception was particularly impaired in older adults, and that it displayed the strongest correlation with prosodic emotion discrimination. We conclude that an important cause of age-related impairment in prosodic emotion comprehension exists at the fundamental sensory level of processing.
Department of Psychology, Durham University, <location>UK</location>
Rachel L C
RL
Mitchell
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, <location>UK</location>
Rachel A
RA
Kingston
D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012938:Social Perception
acoustic discrimination; aging; prosody; social cognition