Emotional stereotypes on trial: Implicit emotion associations for young and old adults.

Individuals use naïve emotion theories, including stereotypical information on the emotional disposition of an interaction partner, to form social impressions. In view of an aging population in Western societies, beliefs on emotion and age become more and more relevant. Across 10 studies, we thus present findings on how individuals associate specific affective states with young and old adults using the emotion implicit association test. The results of the studies are summarized in 2 separate mini meta-analyses. Participants implicitly associated young adult individuals with positive emotions, that is, happiness and serenity, respectively, and old adult individuals with negative emotions, that is, sadness and anger, respectively (Mini Meta-Analysis 1). Within negative emotions, participants preferentially associated young adult individuals with sadness and old adult individuals with anger (Mini Meta-Analysis 2). Even though young and old adults are stereotypically associated with specific emotions, contextual factors influence which age-emotion stereotype is salient in a given context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Through a glass darkly: facial wrinkles affect our processing of emotion in the elderly.

The correct interpretation of emotional expressions is crucial for social life. However, emotions in old relative to young faces are recognized less well. One reason for this may be decreased signal clarity of older faces due to morphological changes, such as wrinkles and folds, obscuring facial displays of emotions. Across three experiments, the present research investigates how misattributions of emotions to elderly faces impair emotion discrimination. In a preliminary task, neutral expressions were perceived as more expressive in old than in young faces by human raters (Experiment 1A) and an automatic system for emotion recognition (Experiment 1B). Consequently, task difficulty was higher for old faces relative to young faces in a visual search task (Experiment 2). Specifically, participants detected old faces expressing negative emotions less accurately and slower among neutral faces of their peers than young faces among neutral faces of their peers. Thus, we argue that age-related changes in facial features are the most plausible explanation for the differences in emotion perception between young and old faces. These findings are of relevance for the social interchange with the elderly, especially when multiple older individuals are present.