As we age it may become harder to recognize others’ emotions

By Gwyn Wright via SWNS

The brain’s ability to correctly recognize emotional cues in people’s voices declines as we grow older, suggests a new study from the UK.

In the study, older people were worse at picking out both positive and negative emotions in someone’s voice.

The seniors often struggled to identify happiness in speech, only picking it out 35 percent of the time.

Meanwhile, twenty-somethings could recognize it 52 percent of the time.

Older people were also 13 percent worse at recognizing disgust in someone’s voice and five percent worse at picking up anger.

Study author Constantina Maltezou-Papastylianou, of the University of Essex, said: “How we say something and our tone of voice is as important during social interactions as to what we are actually saying.

“Have you ever had an awkward moment where something was said with a certain intent but was received differently?"

“I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve joked to my grandmother, only to find out she thought I was being serious, even though I was aiming for a light-hearted tone.

“Research suggests that one of the explanations for this mismatch of our emotional intention when we say something and how it is actually received by the listener may be due to hormonal and anatomical changes that happen in a brain as we age naturally.”

For the study, the team examined two split-age groups of volunteers over three experiments.

All 117 participants had good hearing, spoke English as a first language and were split into two groups with an average age of 67 and 21.

They were played 196 sentences and asked to judge the emotion behind them as their brain activity was monitored.

Listeners were asked to identify which emotion was represented in the speaker’s tone of voice.

Overall, the younger group had an average success rate of 76 percent, whereas the older participants only managed to do it 69 percent of the time.

It is thought the decline is largely due to natural changes in the brain associated with healthy aging.

Their cognitive ability could not be jump-started by electrically stimulating key brain areas.

Future research will explore why we lose the ability to grasp someone’s emotional intention as we age.

Mrs. Maltezou-Papastylianou, who is a doctoral researcher added: “This research is another step forward in understanding how we interpret vocal emotion expressions as we age.

“Emotional recognition from voice can impact many aspects of life and it is important to keep this in mind when interacting with others, particularly with older adults.

“We hope to build on this research going forward and expand the work to look at different demographics, characteristics and personalities.”

The findings were published in the journal PLoS One.