title: Aging Affects Identification of Vocal Emotions in Semantically Neutral Sentences.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The authors determined the accuracy of younger and older adults in identifying vocal emotions using the Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS; Dupuis & Pichora-Fuller, 2010a) and investigated the possible contributions of auditory acuity and suprathreshold processing to emotion identification accuracy.
  
  
  METHODS
  In 2 experiments, younger and older adults with normal hearing listened to and identified vocal emotions in the TESS stimuli. The TESS consists of phrases with controlled syntactic, lexical, and phonological properties spoken by an older female talker and a younger female talker to convey 7 emotion conditions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, neutral, happiness, and pleasant surprise). Participants in both experiments completed audiometric testing; participants in Experiment 2 also completed 3 tests of suprathreshold auditory processing.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Identification by both age groups was above chance for all emotions. Accuracy was lower for older adults in both experiments. The pattern of results was similar across age groups and experiments. Auditory acuity did not predict identification accuracy for either age group in either experiment, nor did performance on tests of auditory processing in Experiment 2.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These results replicate and extend previous findings concerning age-related differences in ability to identify vocal emotions and suggest that older adults' auditory abilities do not explain their difficulties in identifying vocal emotions.
authors: Kate
authors: K
authors: Dupuis
authors: M Kathleen
authors: MK
authors: Pichora-Fuller
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001299:Audiometry; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological; D011581:Psychological Tests; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D055815:Young Adult