Category-Sensitive Age-Related Shifts Between Prosodic and Semantic Dominance in Emotion Perception Linked to Cognitive Capacities.

Purpose: Prior research extensively documented challenges in recognizing verbal and nonverbal emotion among older individuals when compared with younger counterparts. However, the nature of these age-related changes remains unclear. The present study investigated how older and younger adults comprehend four basic emotions (i.e., anger, happiness, neutrality, and sadness) conveyed through verbal (semantic) and nonverbal (facial and prosodic) channels.

Method: A total of 73 older adults (43 women, M_age = 70.18 years) and 74 younger adults (37 women, M_age = 22.01 years) partook in a fixed-choice test for recognizing emotions presented visually via facial expressions or auditorily through prosody or semantics.

Results: The results confirmed age-related decline in recognizing emotions across all channels except for identifying happy facial expressions. Furthermore, the two age groups demonstrated both commonalities and disparities in their inclinations toward specific channels. While both groups displayed a shared dominance of visual facial cues over auditory emotional signals, older adults indicated a preference for semantics, whereas younger adults displayed a preference for prosody in auditory emotion perception. Notably, the dominance effects observed in older adults for visual and semantic cues were less pronounced for sadness and anger compared to other emotions. These challenges in emotion recognition and the shifts in channel preferences among older adults were correlated with their general cognitive capabilities.

Conclusion: Together, the findings underscore that age-related obstacles in perceiving emotions and alterations in channel dominance, which vary by emotional category, are significantly intertwined with overall cognitive functioning.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27307251.