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Subscribe to RSSHaving wrinkles adds well, a new wrinkle for young people trying to gauge the emotions seen on older people's faces. A new study suggests that younger people may make more mistakes when judging the emotions of older folks.
To younger adults, age-related changes, such as wrinkles and folds, look like facial expressions, so they may interfere with the perception of emotion in an older face and perhaps convey the wrong message.
In the study, published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers asked 65 college students to view computer-generated black and white faces. They viewed faces of three men and three women who were young (ages 19 to 21) or old (ages 76 to 83) displaying one of four facial expressions: neutral, happy, sad, or angry.
Participants were asked to rate the emotional expression on the person's face on a scale from 1 for "not at all intense" to 7 for "very intense."
Young people were were most accurate in recognizing an angry expression and least accurate in judging sadness in old faces. They perceived happy faces in older people as showing less overall emotion than a younger person.
The study found that a facial expression, such as pure anger, on an older face is perceived differently -- and less clearly -- than the very same expression displayed on a younger person.
"In the case of the older expresser, the anger is seen as mixed with other emotions," says lead author Dr. Ursula Hess, a professor of psychology at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany. "Clearly it makes a difference whether you think someone is just angry or someone is both angry and sad," she adds.
Even when it came to a neutral face, volunteers perceived that there was more emotion in a neutral older face than in a younger one.
Courtesy of Dr. Ursula Hess
Here's an example of the images researchers used in the study.
Researchers suggest that wrinkles do impact the communication of emotion.
"We may make mistakes when judging the emotions of the elderly," says Hess. "This may result in less harmonious interactions."
The age of the observers also likely made a difference in the results. Had the study participants been closer in age to the older faces, they would have had more experience at recognizing older faces to overcome the difficulties posed by a less clear emotional signal, Hess explains.
Although Botox may help smooth out the furrows and lines of an older face, it won't make it any easier for people to gauge your emotions. The cosmetic injections may limit facial expressions, making them harder to read.
So how can an older person make their emotions more visible -- and less obscure -- to other people?
Emotions are usually transmitted via a number of channels, including voice and posture, as well as the face, suggests Hess. And during everyday interactions, expressions are more dynamic than looking at a black-and-white photograph in a lab.
Since there are many different sources of emotion information, "an attentive interaction partner could learn how to properly decode the emotion," says Hess. That's probably why older people are better at decoding other older people's expressions.
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Leave a Comment:
And we (wrinkled faces) like it that way!!!! We only show emotion when we don't get our senior discount. :o)
What senior discount? Used to hear about them, and thought, gee, one of the nice things about aging. Where are they? Oh that's right.Merchandisers and restaurants realized they needed to make up for lost income. So just like with the gov., make the seniors pay through the @%%.
I guess I'm getting old, because the "old" faces in the image don't really look all that old...
They never look up from their "devices". They see almost nothing.
correct no social interaction.
That would make sense if younger people were less able to read emotions on ALL faces than older people (which was true), but it would not explain why there was a difference between their ability to read emotions of faces of different ages.
Correction: The article does not accurately describe the paper. Only young people were tested, meaning that no comparison can be made based on the age of the viewer. The key finding of the study was that older faces are more difficult to read than younger ones.
I think.....in my humble opinion......that younger people have more difficulty 'reading' emotions on faces because (is it possible) the younger people have grown up with videos....games, etc., which have no inherent human reactions which need to be interpreted by another human. Therefore, the lack of human interraction means they (the younger folk) have no need to learn subtle changes of facial expressions.
Or, gasp, maybe the reason is because of a far more neutral, yet completely plausible reason. Young people hang out with young people, older people hang out with older people. Because of sheer exposure, young people are better reading expressions on other younger people than older people. Or maybe it's also because of the reason given in the article that "wrinkles and folds, look like facial expressions, so they may interfere with the perception of emotion in an older face.'' You can't deny that wrinkles change the landscape of one's face, which can, in turn, affect how facial expressions look and are perceived by others.
Sarah, are you saying we should... listen? To the scientists? That they might know something about this?
That is such a load of bull, young people today just don't want to be bothered to observe. They've become so desensitized from seeing others by lack of social skills. Using texting, computers, and gaming has isolated them from the real world.
They observe different things because they are the Video generation and a lot of them only see an old person (read grand parent) a few times per year.
Some young people don't know how to read emotion on any face. Social media devices that they cannot live without have no emotions.
Those that are "EMO"s use dark clothes and make up to try to convince everyone that they are emotionally intune with the Gothic world. They need a size nine in the back side of their "EMO".
Time for parents to put their I-PODS down and raise their children to be human beings.
Be they can read my boot up their asses!
So many nasty responses from the older crowd.
Maybe it is a lack of social interaction that causes some of this. Or maybe it's more along the lines of what Sarah - 3995213 suggested in #4.1.
The article didn't say younger people couldn't read emotional expressions of anybody; they couldn't read the expressions of the older people. This indicates that social interaction - at least with their peers - is not the problem.
The study itself doesn't even say that. All it says is that it is harder to read emotion on older faces than younger ones. The study didn't even look at the age of the viewers.
Actually, it did state they were college students, but that could encompass people up to 30 or older...
As someone who is "middle-aged", a lot of my kids friends don't actually "look" at me. Their eyes skim by , or look down or over my head. I do know some adults my age (typically males) who view eye contact by late teens early twenties as a "challenge" to "their authority". (These same idiots can not often tell you what their kids LOOK like or even what they wear past a vague "dark clothes" statement.) Kids who aren't taught to connect with people and look them in the eye rarely ever learn to read expressions on faces. Don't blame the growing/grown children for the parents lack of care and teaching.
How do these people mate? Wow, that's got to be super passionate. <insert robot voice> I feel like I would like to be closer to you yet I can not detect whether this would be persmissible like a post on fb page if that would acceptable" GMAB they don't care! <insert robot voice> Duh, Like, I feel like, there should be an app for ranges of human emotion. I weep for the future.
Of course young people have social interaction. Just because they have and use a cellphone doesn't mean that they never look up from it.
Lots of young people will look at the face of Mitch McConnell and not understand he is one of the top reasons that many of them are having trouble finding jobs.
or ego centric younger people just don't care. Because, as we all know, young people know everything.
LOL
A gazillion years of young people "reading" the faces of their elders, and now it's a "problem" that no doubt will prompt a forthcoming self help book. What rubbish. For centuries, culture centered ON older people, not on kids, and children and older adults interacted very well, thank you very much. I as a child had no problem whatsoever seeing past "wrinkles" on the faces of grandparents and older neighbors, hearing the tone of their voices or seeing expressions on their faces. I hung out WITH older people, helped them in their gardens, listened to their stories, sometimes got a pat on the head or a cookie, and sometimes even got scolded, but the wrinkles on their faces never obscured their humanity or my ability to see into their eyes.
Can they read my fist as it plasters into their wrinkle-fee, porcelain little faces? I worked with an intern and told him to put 100 stamps on the Christmas cards. He put them on the left upper corner. I made him remove everyone and put them in the right place. Oh so gratifying.
The little milleniums are so dumb its pathetic.
Kinds and young adults have a hard time recognizing emotions on any face... they did this scientific study a long time ago... it's just they way we are. Old news...