Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences
HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
 QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced]


     


This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Sullivan, S.
Right arrow Articles by Hutton, S. B.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Sullivan, S.
Right arrow Articles by Hutton, S. B.
The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 62:P53-P60 (2007)
© 2007 The Gerontological Society of America


RESEARCH ARTICLE

Age Differences in Emotion Recognition Skills and the Visual Scanning of Emotion Faces

Susan Sullivan, Ted Ruffman and Sam B. Hutton

1 Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, England.
2 Department of Psychology, University of Otago, New Zealand.

Address correspondence to Susan Sullivan, School of Life Sciences, JMS Building 3d7, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9RH, United Kingdom. E-mail: susansu{at}biols.susx.ac.uk.

Research suggests that a person's emotion recognition declines with advancing years. We examined whether or not this age-related decline was attributable to a tendency to overlook emotion information in the eyes. In Experiment 1, younger adults were significantly better than older adults at inferring emotions from full faces and eyes, though not from mouths. Using an eye tracker in Experiment 2, we found young adults, in comparison with older adults, to have superior emotion recognition performance and to look proportionately more to eyes than mouths. However, although better emotion recognition performance was significantly correlated with more eye looking in younger adults, the same was not true in older adults. We discuss these results in terms of brain changes with age.







HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS
All GSA journals The Gerontologist
Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences
Copyright © 2007 by The Gerontological Society of America.