Abstract :
Young and old adults’ ability to recognize
emotions from vocal expressions and music performances
was compared. The stimuli consisted of (a) acted speech
(anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness; each posed
with both weak and strong emotion intensity), (b) synthesized
speech (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness), and (c)
short melodies played on the electric guitar (anger, fear,
happiness, and sadness; each played with both weak and
strong emotion intensity). The listeners’ recognition of
discrete emotions and emotion intensity was assessed and
the recognition rates were controlled for various response
biases. Results showed emotion-specific age-related differences
in recognition accuracy. Old adults consistently
received significantly lower recognition rates for negative,
but not for positive, emotions for both speech and music
stimuli. Some age-related differences were also evident in
the listeners’ ratings of emotion intensity. The results show
the importance of considering individual emotions in
studies on age-related differences in emotion recognition.
