Ziaei Maryam, Burianová Hana, von Hippel William, Ebner Natalie C, Phillips Louise H, Henry Julie D
Centre for Advanced Imaging, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Centre for Advanced Imaging, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; Department of Psychology, Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, UK.
Neurobiol Aging. 2016 Dec;48:182-194. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2016.08.026. Epub 2016 Sep 6.
Normal adult aging is associated with difficulties in processing social cues to emotions such as anger and also altered motivation to focus more on positive than negative information. Gaze direction is an important modifier of the social signals conveyed by an emotion, for example, an angry face looking directly at you is considerably more threatening than an angry face looking away. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that older adults would show less neural differentiation to angry faces with direct and avert gaze compared to younger people, with the opposite prediction for happy faces. Healthy older (65-75 years; mean = 69.75) and younger (17-27 years; mean = 20.65) adults completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment in which they were asked to identify happy and angry expressions displayed either with direct or averted gaze. While younger adults showed neural sensitivity to eye-gaze direction during recognition of angry expressions, older adults showed no effect of eye-gaze direction on neural response. In contrast, older adults showed sensitivity to eye-gaze direction during recognition of happy expressions but younger adults did not. Additionally, brain-behavior correlations were conducted to investigate the relationships between emotion recognition and mentalizing brain network in both age groups. Younger (but not older) adults' social cognitive performance was differentially correlated with activation in 2 brain networks when looking at angry faces with direct compared to averted gaze. These novel findings provide evidence for age-related differences in the neural substrates underlying the capacity to integrate facial affect and eye-gaze cues. The results of this study suggest that age-related differences in integrating facial cues may be related to engagement of the mentalizing network, with potentially important implications for social cognitive functioning in late adulthood.
正常的成年人衰老与处理诸如愤怒等情绪的社会线索困难有关，并且在动机上也发生了改变，更加关注积极信息而非消极信息。注视方向是情绪所传达的社会信号的一个重要调节因素，例如，一张愤怒的脸直视你比一张愤怒的脸看向别处更具威胁性。在本研究中，我们检验了这样一个假设：与年轻人相比，老年人对直接注视和回避注视的愤怒面孔的神经区分较少，而对快乐面孔的预测则相反。健康的老年人（65 - 75岁；平均年龄 = 69.75岁）和年轻人（17 - 27岁；平均年龄 = 20.65岁）完成了一项功能磁共振成像实验，在实验中他们被要求识别以直接注视或回避注视呈现出的快乐和愤怒表情。在识别愤怒表情时，年轻人表现出对注视方向的神经敏感性，而老年人则未表现出注视方向对神经反应的影响。相反，在识别快乐表情时，老年人表现出对注视方向的敏感性，而年轻人则没有。此外，还进行了脑 - 行为相关性分析，以研究两个年龄组中情绪识别与心理化脑网络之间的关系。当直接注视与回避注视愤怒面孔时，年轻人（而非老年人）的社会认知表现与两个脑网络的激活存在差异相关性。这些新发现为面部情感和注视线索整合能力背后的神经基础存在年龄相关差异提供了证据。本研究结果表明，面部线索整合方面的年龄相关差异可能与心理化网络的参与有关，这对成年晚期的社会认知功能可能具有潜在的重要意义。
