Dupuis Kate, Pichora-Fuller M Kathleen
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2015 Jun;58(3):1061-76. doi: 10.1044/2015_JSLHR-H-14-0256.
The authors determined the accuracy of younger and older adults in identifying vocal emotions using the Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS; Dupuis & Pichora-Fuller, 2010a) and investigated the possible contributions of auditory acuity and suprathreshold processing to emotion identification accuracy.
In 2 experiments, younger and older adults with normal hearing listened to and identified vocal emotions in the TESS stimuli. The TESS consists of phrases with controlled syntactic, lexical, and phonological properties spoken by an older female talker and a younger female talker to convey 7 emotion conditions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, neutral, happiness, and pleasant surprise). Participants in both experiments completed audiometric testing; participants in Experiment 2 also completed 3 tests of suprathreshold auditory processing.
Identification by both age groups was above chance for all emotions. Accuracy was lower for older adults in both experiments. The pattern of results was similar across age groups and experiments. Auditory acuity did not predict identification accuracy for either age group in either experiment, nor did performance on tests of auditory processing in Experiment 2.
These results replicate and extend previous findings concerning age-related differences in ability to identify vocal emotions and suggest that older adults' auditory abilities do not explain their difficulties in identifying vocal emotions.
作者使用多伦多情感语音集（TESS；Dupuis和Pichora-Fuller，2010a）确定了年轻人和老年人识别语音情感的准确性，并研究了听力敏锐度和阈上加工对情感识别准确性的可能影响。
在两项实验中，听力正常的年轻人和老年人聆听并识别TESS刺激中的语音情感。TESS由一位老年女性说话者和一位年轻女性说话者说出的具有受控句法、词汇和语音特性的短语组成，以传达7种情感状态（愤怒、厌恶、恐惧、悲伤、中性、快乐和惊喜）。两项实验的参与者均完成了听力测试；实验2的参与者还完成了3项阈上听觉加工测试。
两个年龄组对所有情感的识别准确率均高于随机水平。在两项实验中，老年人的准确率较低。各年龄组和实验的结果模式相似。在任何一项实验中，听力敏锐度均无法预测任何一个年龄组的识别准确率，实验2中的听觉加工测试表现也无法预测。
这些结果重复并扩展了先前关于年龄相关的语音情感识别能力差异的研究发现，并表明老年人的听觉能力并不能解释他们在识别语音情感方面的困难。
