Andrew Mienaltowski¹, Tashaunda Grimmett¹, Lynnsey Cole¹, Natalie Spiva¹; ¹Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky USA

Advancing age is often associated with poorer emotion recognition performance in images of static facial expressions. However, weak to no age differences are observed when participants characterize emotion in dynamic facial stimuli. The current study investigated whether age differences in emotion perception for dynamic stimuli may be more prevalent in the complexity of the labels freely offered to describe emotional expressions than in measures of label selection accuracy common to emotion perception tasks. Younger and older adults observed younger, middle-aged, and older adult actors expressing anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness via dynamic video stimuli. Labels offered by participants were coded for measures of lexical complexity, as well as for the relevance of each label to the objective emotion category from which the stimulus was drawn. Participant age had minimal impact on the complexity of the emotion labels offered or on their relevance to the stimulus category. However, the complexity of the participants’ labels did vary by the age of the actor expressing emotion. More complex labels were offered for older actors than for younger actors, especially for expressions of anger and sadness. Although this suggests nuance in the perception of anger and sadness in older actors’ facial cues, the labels offered by participants were less relevant to the stimuli’s objective emotion categories. In addition, participants were less accurate at selecting the correct emotion label for older actors expressing anger and sadness. Taken together, these findings suggest that participants, regardless of their age, struggle more to decode the facial cues of older adults expressing negative emotions than they do those of younger adults, possibly due to a reduction in the emotion signal found in the expressive cues of older adults.