Citation

Riediger M, Voelkle MC, Ebner NC, Lindenberger U. Cogn. Emot. 2011; 25(6): 968-982.

Affiliation

Max Planck Research Group Affect Across the Lifespan, Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/02699931.2010.540812

PMID

21432636

Abstract

Young, middle-aged, and older raters (N=154) evaluated 1,026 prototypical facial poses of neutrality, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness stemming from 171 young, middle-aged, and older posers. The majority of poses were rated as multi-faceted, that is, to comprise several expressions of varying intensities. Consistent with the notion of age-related increases in negativity-avoidance/positivity effects, crossed-random effects analyses showed an age-related decrease in the attributions of negative, but not positive and neutral, target expressions (that the poser intended to show), and an age-related increase in the attributions of positive and neutral, but not negative, non-target expressions (that the posers did not intend to show). Expressions were more difficult to read the older the posers, particularly for male posers. These age-of-poser effects were independent of the valence of the expression, but partly differed across age groups of raters. The study supports the idea of multi-dimensionality and age-dependency of emotion perception.

Language: en