Adult age differences in evoked emotional responses to dynamic facial expressions

Objective: Facial expressions are powerful social signals that motivate feelings and action in the observer. Research on face processing has overwhelmingly used static facial images, which are limited in their ecological validity. Previous research on the age-related positivity effect and age differences in social motivation suggest that older adults might experience different evoked emotional responses to facial expressions than younger adults. Here we were explored age-related differences in evoked responses to dynamic facial expressions across adulthood. Method: We used dynamic facial expressions which varied by expression type (happy, sad, angry) and expression level (low, medium, full) to gather participant ratings on their evoked emotional response to these stimuli along the dimensions of valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal. Results: As predicted, older adults rated the emotions evoked by positive facial expressions (happy) more positively than younger adults. Further, older adults rated the emotion evoked by negative facial expressions (angry and sad) more negatively than younger adults. Contrary to our predictions, older adults did not differ significantly in arousal to negative expressions compared to younger adults. Across all ages, individuals rated positive expressions as more arousing than negative expressions. Discussion: The findings provide some evidence that older adults may be more sensitive to variations in dynamic facial expressions than younger adults, particularly in terms of their estimates of valence. These dynamic facial stimuli that vary in magnitude are promising for future studies of more naturalistic affect elicitation, studies of social incentive processing, and use in incentive-driven choice tasks.