1 J Aging Sci, Vol. 8, Iss. S3.004 ABSTRACT Older adults (≥ 60 years) are worse than young adults (< 30 years) recognizing facial, bodily, auditory and musical emotion expressions. I ask what causes these difficulties and run through five theories: (1) a positivity bias, (2) general cognitive decline, (3) a failure to look at the eyes, (4) stimuli with low ecological validity, and (5) brain change. I argue that brain change is the most likely cause, although currently there have still been only a few studies to examine this idea, and further, it is not clear what pattern of brain activation might be examined to differentiate young and older adults. Keywords: Mental health; Geriatric care; Cognitive decline; Aging Journal of Aging Science Mini-review What Causes Age-Related Emotion Recognition Decline? Ted Ruffman * Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand DESCRIPTION Older adults (60+ years) tend to be worse than young adults (<30 years) when recognizing emotion in faces, bodies, and voices [1], as well as music [2]. We proposed that brain change likely accounted for these differences [1]. Below, I examine four other explanations of older adults’ difficulties, before re-considering brain change. Positivity bias Older adults are biased to look at positive stimuli and avoid negative stimuli [3]. This led some [4,5] to suggest that older adults’ emotion recognition difficulties stem from a positivity bias. However, our meta-analysis [1] indicated that older adults don’t always have difficulty on negative stimuli (e.g., no age differences on vocal expressions of fear or disgust; older adults marginally better on facial expressions of disgust). Nor were older adults always better on positive stimuli (e.g., significantly worse on facial and vocal expressions of happiness). General cognitive decline Some claim that deterioration of frontal brain areas leads to reductions in fluid intelligence and executive functions, and subsequent emotion recognition difficulties. Although one study found a relation between older adults’ emotion recognition and general cognition [6] usually recognition difficulties are largely independent of fluid IQ [7-14]. Gaze patterns Older adults’ have particular difficulty with facial expressions of anger, sadness and fear [1]. Identification of anger, sadness, and fear is better when people look at the top half of faces [15-19]. In addition, older adults focus less on the eye region and more on the mouth region compared to young adults [17,19-22]. Thus, Mather concluded that older adults’ failure to look at eyes explains their worse recognition of facial expressions of anger, sadness, and fear [23]. However, this argument doesn’t explain older adults’ difficulties recognizing auditory, bodily or musical expressions [1], matching auditory to bodily expressions [24] or recognizing emotion in music [2]. Second, older adults have difficulty recognizing emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear even when compelled to look at the eyes by presenting just this portion of the face [22]. Ecological validity Isaacowitz and Stanley argued that older adults are worse on emotion recognition tasks because the stimuli lack ecological validity [4,21,25]. For instance, emotion recognition studies use static single-modality images (e.g., still images of faces or bodies), whereas in real life people see dynamic, multimodal displays. Yet, again, several findings are inconsistent with this idea. Ruffman et al., used dynamic bodily expressions, and Sullivan, et al. used dynamic facial expressions (videos of changing facial expressions), yet both studies found age-related difficulties [13,24]. Further, although Grainger et al., found that dynamic expressions provided some benefit to middle-aged and older Correspondence to: Dr. Ted Ruffman, Department of Psychology, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand, Tel : +64 3479 7670; Fax: +64 03 479 8335; E-mail: ted.ruffman@otago.ac.nz Received: December 15, 2020; Accepted: December 29, 2020; Published: January 05, 2020 Citation: Ruffman T (2020) What Causes Age-Related Emotion Recognition Decline? J Aging Sci. S3: 004. Copyright: © 2020 Ruffman T. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. ISSN: 2329-8847