APA PROOFS Verbosity and Emotion Recognition in Older Adults Ted Ruffman, Janice Murray, Jamin Halberstadt, and Mele Taumoepeau University of Otago Previous research suggests that older adults are more verbose than young adults and that general inhibitory difficulties might play a role in such tendencies. In the present study of 60 young adults and 61 older adults, the authors examined whether verbosity might also be related to difficulty deciphering emotional expressions. Measures of verbosity included total talking time, percentage of time spent on-topic, and extremity of off-topic verbosity. Over all 3 measures, older men and women were significantly more verbose than young men and women. Older men’s (but not older women’s) verbosity was related to poorer emotion recognition, which fully mediated the age effect. The results are consistent with the idea that older men who talk more do so, in part, because they fail to decipher the emotional cues of a listener. Keywords: older adults, verbosity, emotion recognition Verbosity is characterized as extended speech that is lacking in focus or coherence (Arbuckle & Pushkar Gold, 1993). A stereo- type of older adults (e.g., 60 years) is that they tend to be verbose, and a number of studies indicate that a small proportion of older adults do tend to talk more and go off-topic more (e.g., Arbuckle & Pushkar Gold, 1993; Gold, Andres, Arbuckle, & Schwartzman, 1988). James, Burke, Austin, and Hulme (1998) argued that older adults talk more because their communicative goals emphasize a description of significant life events rather than the concise provision of information. However, Arbuckle, Nohara- LeClair, and Pushkar (2000) found that a small proportion of older adults tend to talk more even when trying to communicate which of a number of objects a listener should choose, that is, when a description of significant life events should not be relevant to their conversational goals. Verbosity has a number of real-world implications. Pushkar et al. (2000) found that when paired with same-aged peers, verbose individuals talked more, were less interested in their conversa- tional partner, focused more on themselves, and had conversa- tional partners who were less satisfied with the conversation. Not surprisingly, then, greater verbosity is related to poorer psychos- ocial functioning (Arbuckle & Pushkar Gold, 1993; Gold et al., 1988). An important question is what causes heightened levels of verbosity in some older adults. Several studies link older adults’ tendency to be verbose to cognitive disinhibition (e.g., Arbuckle & Pushkar Gold, 1993; Pushkar Gold & Arbuckle, 1995). Yet, cor- relations tend to be relatively modest (e.g., around .24 to .27 in Arbuckle & Pushkar Gold, 1993), and not all tasks measuring inhibition have correlated with verbosity, suggesting there are other factors involved. In the present study, we examined the possibility that verbosity relates to a diminished ability to detect emotional expressions. For instance, verbose older adults may fail to pick up on signs of boredom or irritation in their listener. A recent meta-analytic review concluded that older adults are worse than young adults at labeling various facial, auditory, and bodily expressions (Ruffman, Henry, Livingstone, & Phillips, 2008). In particular, recognition of anger and sadness across all three modes of expressions is worse in older adults. In addition, older adults are not as good at recog- nizing complex emotions and mental states (e.g., regretful, accus- ing, reflective, preoccupied) in the eyes (Phillips, MacLean, & Allen, 2002) and, when examining photographs of facial expres- sions, spend less time looking at the eyes and more time looking at mouths than do young adults (Sullivan, Ruffman, & Hutton, 2007; Wong, Cronin-Golomb, & Neargarder, 2005). The eyes are more informative than mouths for basic emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear (Bassili, 1979; Calder, Young, Keane, & Dean, 2000; Sullivan et al., 2007), and are also more informative than mouths and as informative as the whole face for complex mental states such as interested, thoughtful, and scheming (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Jolliffe, 1997). A failure to look at the eyes might result in a reduced ability to extract social cues that would indicate a need to stop talking. Worse recognition of emotions such as shame and fear has also been implicated in older adults’ difficulty detecting lies (Tehan Stanley & Blanchard-Fields, 2008) because liars have been shown to leak these emotions (Frank & Ekman, 1997). There is also evidence for gender differences in verbosity and emotion recognition. Older men’s style of conversation is similar in some ways to those who score highly on measures of off-topic verbosity (Pushkar et al., 2000), and meta-analytic findings indi- cate that young women tend to be better recognizing emotions than young men (Hall, 1978). Thus, a plausible hypothesis is that older men have worse emotion recognition than older women, which in turn leads to worse verbosity; in other words, a link between emotion recognition and verbosity will be stronger in older men. In sum, older adults score worse on a number of tasks measuring emotion recognition and social insight, which might contribute to Ted Ruffman, Janice Murray, Jamin Halberstadt, and Mele Taumo- epeau, Department of Psychology, University of Otago. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ted Ruffman, Department of Psychology, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. E-mail: tedr@psy.otago.ac.nz Psychology and Aging © 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. ●●, No. ●, 000–000 0882-7974/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0018247 1 tapraid5/z2m-aging/z2m-aging/z2m00110/z2m2336d10z xppws S1 1/12/10 2:44 Art: 2009-0627