RESUMEN
Eliciting negative stereotypes about ageing commonly results in worse performance on many physical, memory, and cognitive tasks in adults aged over 65. The current studies explored the potential effect of this "stereotype threat" phenomenon on older adults' emotion recognition, a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. In Study 1, stereotypes about emotion recognition ability across the lifespan were established. In Study 2, these stereotypes were utilised in a stereotype threat manipulation that framed an emotion recognition task as assessing either cognitive ability (stereotypically believed to worsen with age), social ability (believed to be stable across lifespan), or general abilities (control). Participants then completed an emotion recognition task in which they labelled dynamic expressions of negative and positive emotions. Self-reported threat concerns were also measured. Framing an emotion recognition task as assessing cognitive ability significantly heightened older adults' (but not younger adults') reports of stereotype threat concerns. Despite this, older adults' emotion recognition performance was unaffected. Unlike other cognitive abilities, recognising facially expressed emotions may be unaffected by stereotype threat, possibly because emotion recognition is automatic, making it less susceptible to the cognitive load that stereotype threat produces.
RESUMEN
OBJECTIVES: Eye gaze has been shown to influence emotion recognition. In addition, older adults (over 65 years) are not as influenced by gaze direction cues as young adults (18-30 years). Nevertheless, these differences might stem from the use of young to middle-aged faces in emotion recognition research because older adults have an attention bias toward old-age faces. Therefore, using older face stimuli might allow older adults to process gaze direction cues to influence emotion recognition. METHOD: To investigate this idea, young and older adults completed an emotion recognition task with young and older face stimuli displaying direct and averted gaze, assessing labeling accuracy for angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and sad faces. RESULTS: Direct gaze rather than averted gaze improved young adults' recognition of emotions in young and older faces, but for older adults this was true only for older faces. DISCUSSION: The current study highlights the impact of stimulus face age and gaze direction on emotion recognition in young and older adults. The use of young face stimuli with direct gaze in most research might contribute to age-related emotion recognition differences.