Perception of emotion across the adult life span in three communication channels
Item
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Title
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Perception of emotion across the adult life span in three communication channels
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:8ea0ae18b007:10725
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identifier
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10983
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Creator
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Finley, Katherine,
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Contributor
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Joan C. Borod
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Developmental psychology | Neurosciences | Aging | Emotion Perception | Emotion Recognition | Laterality | Lifespan Psychology | Neuropsychology
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Abstract
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The current study examined age-related differences in emotion perception skills in 116 healthy adults, aged 20--89. Subjects completed identification and discrimination emotion perception tasks involving positive and negative emotion stimuli in three channels of communication: facial, lexical, and prosodic. The emotion tasks were from the New York Emotion Battery (NYEB; Borod, Obler, & Welkowitz, 1992).;Participants were screened for cognitive functioning, psychiatric and neurological history, dementia, and perceptual skills, using procedures from the NYEB, and were matched across age groups for demographic variables. Associations among demographic characteristics (gender, ethnicity, and educational level), nonemotional control tasks from the NYEB, and emotion perception tasks were examined using multiple regression. Age was also included in these analyses in order to directly evaluate the effects of age and the effects of these other variables.;We examined age-related differences in emotion perception, in general, and explored whether age-related differences varied as a function of communication channel and valence in the context of the general decline with age hypothesis, the right hemi-aging hypothesis, and the positivity bias.;In light of research showing that relationships among cognitive functions become more homogeneous, or less specialized, with age, we examined relationships among the three emotion channels within the context of the hemispheric asymmetry reduction with old age (HAROLD; Cabeza, 2002) and dedifferentiation models.;For all three channels of communication, older adults performed worse than younger adults. Years of education predicted performance for lexical tasks only. Age emerged as the most significant predictor of performance on emotion perception tasks, and neither ethnicity nor gender generally emerged as significant predictors of performance. Interrelationships among channels were stronger for older adults (i.e., 70- and 80-year-olds) than for their younger cohorts.;Results are discussed in the context of neuropsychological and psychosocial theories of aging and emotion. The finding that older groups encountered significantly more difficulty with emotion perception tasks is consistent with the general decline hypothesis and aspects of the right hemi-aging hypothesis. There was no positivity bias demonstrated among the older participants. Abilities within participants were more homogeneous in older age groups, suggesting that emotion perception skills become less specialized with age.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
