La reconnaissance d’émotions faciales et musicales dans le processus de vieillissement normal
A growing number of studies report differences between older and younger adults in emotion recognition. However, there are still conflicting results regarding the extent of the changes and how they may vary depending on the expressed emotion and the medium used. The present study aims at supplementing our understanding of the global phenomenon by focusing on cognitively normal older adults’ capacity to recognize both facial and musical emotions. A group of 34 older adults, aged between 65 and 87, and a control group of 31 younger adults, aged between 18 and 50, completed two separate tasks evaluating emotion recognition of faces and music. The facial emotion categorization task includes faces expressing happiness, sadness, fear, anger and surprise. The musical emotion categorization task includes music excerpts expressing happiness, sadness and fear. Results indicate differences in emotion recognition between age groups. Indeed, older adults are less accurate than younger adults in the recognition of all five emotions as expressed by faces, but only of fear and sadness as expressed by musical excerpts. Both groups categorize happiness, as expressed by music, in a similar manner. Lastly, for both groups, fear is the less accurately recognized emotion, whether it is expressed by faces or music. In this regard, as normal aging involves many physiological and psychological changes that may be related to those observations, it has been proposed that the results may be partially explained by both the socioemotional and the neurological theories.
Normal aging Emotion recognition Facial emotion Musical emotion Positivity effect