ArticlePeerJ2018
Effects of age on the identification of emotions in facial expressions: a meta-analysis.
Article in PeerJ, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A scoping review of emotional contagion research with human subjects: identifying common trends of previous research and potential areas for future research.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Effects of chronic intranasal oxytocin on visual attention to faces vs. natural scenes in older adults.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2024Trial
- Exploring emotion identification and categorisation in simulated central vision loss: an event-related potential study.BMJ open ophthalmology · 2026Article
- A multidimensional normative framework for fine-grained social cognition assessment with the BCS.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Tearjerkers may leave some eyes dry: Emotional reactivity to film clips from adolescence to old age.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Impaired event-related theta spectral coherence in emotional facial expression processing in neurodegenerative disorders.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Effects of aging on recognition and dominance perception in laughter.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Article
- Facial emotion processing hemispheric bias is weakly associated with handedness, autistic traits and biological sex, but not age.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Emotion Processing in Late Adulthood: The Effect of Emotional Valence and Face Age on Behavior and Scanning Patterns.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Regulation of interpersonal distance in virtual reality: Implications for socio-emotional functioning in late adulthood.PloS one · 2025Article
- Older and younger adults' perceptions of augmented reality photorealistic avatars as a viable medium for interpersonal communication.Innovation in aging · 2025Article
- Age Differences in Mental State Inference of Sarcasm: Contributions of Facial Emotion Recognition and Cognitive Performance.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2024Article
- Facial emotion recognition in individuals with mild cognitive impairment: An exploratory study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- New directions for studying the aging social-cognitive brain.Current opinion in psychology · 2024Review
- A Comparative Study Recognizing the Expression of Information Between Elderly Individuals and Young Individuals.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- Neural correlates of successful emotion recognition in healthy elderly: a multimodal imaging study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- A database of heterogeneous faces for studying naturalistic expressions.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Surgical face masks do not impair the decoding of facial expressions of negative affect more severely in older than in younger adults.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Older adults have difficulty decoding emotions from the eyes, whereas easterners have difficulty decoding emotion from the mouth.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The association between language and recognition of facial emotional expressions in elderly individuals.CoDAS · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundEmotion identification is a fundamental component of social cognition. Although it is well established that a general cognitive decline occurs with advancing age, the effects of age on emotion identification is still unclear. A meta-analysis by Ruffman and colleagues (2008) explored this issue, but much research has been published since then, reporting inconsistent findings.
methodsTo examine age differences in the identification of facial expressions of emotion, we conducted a meta-analysis of 24 empirical studies (
resultsResults show that older adults less accurately identify facial expressions of anger, sadness, fear, surprise, and happiness compared to younger adults, strengthening the results obtained by Ruffman et al. (2008). However, meta-regression analyses indicate that effect sizes are moderated by sample characteristics and stimulus features. Importantly, the estimated effect size for the identification of fear and disgust increased for larger differences in the number of years of formal education between the two groups. DISCUSSION: We discuss several factors that might explain the age-related differences in emotion identification and suggest how brain changes may account for the observed pattern. Furthermore, moderator effects are interpreted and discussed.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.