The perception of facial emotion across the adult life span

This study was designed to examine changes in the perception of facial emotion across the adult life span. Subjects were 30 young (ages 21 to 39 years), 30 middle-aged (ages 40 to 59 years), and 30 older (ages 60 to 81 years) normal adult right-handed females. The three groups of subjects were carefully screened for neurological and psychiatric disorders and for cognitive and visuoperceptual deficits; the groups were closely matched on demographic variables. Subjects were required to identify photographs of facial emotional expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 1976). There were no overall changes in accuracy of perception as a function of age. The ages of posers in the photographs did not influence the perceptual accuracy scores. This study contributes to the literature about the characteristics of normal emotional processing across the adult life span.