Auditory and Visual Integration for Emotion Recognition and Compensation for Degraded Signals are Preserved With Age.
Minke J de Boer, Tim Jürgens, Deniz Başkent and 1 others
PMID 34617829WHAT IT FOUND
Older adults recognized emotions less accurately than young adults across all conditions.
However, they integrated audio and video just as well and compensated for degraded sound equally. They did not show the expected 'positivity effect' for happy faces.
Key findings
01Older participants had lower emotion recognition accuracy than younger participants in all conditions, including positive emotions.
02Both age groups showed similar ability to integrate audio and visual information and to compensate for degraded audio signals.
03Older adults fixated more on the mouth and less on the eyes, and made smaller gaze adaptations to degraded video than younger adults.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used simulated sensory loss in healthy participants, which may not fully replicate the long-term adaptation or cognitive changes seen in actual hearing and vision loss. The older group included seven participants who did not meet strict criteria for 'normal' hearing or vision, though they self-reported as normal. The results are based on dynamic movie clips with pseudo-speech (no semantic content), so findings may not apply to real conversations with meaningful words. Eye-tracking analysis was restricted to the first 1,000 ms of each clip, potentially missing later gaze adjustments.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. Funding was provided by a BCN-BRAIN grant from the University of Groningen and the Landelijke Stichting voor Blinden en Slechtzienden.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume older adults have a preserved ability to recognize positive emotions. This study found accuracy was lower for all emotions, including happiness, compared to younger adults.