Saito Akie, Sato Wataru, Yoshikawa Sakiko
Kokoro Research Center, Kyoto University, 46 Shimoadachi, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Mar 25;7(3):191715. doi: 10.1098/rsos.191715. eCollection 2020 Mar.
Previous experimental psychology studies based on visual search paradigms have reported that young adults detect emotional facial expressions more rapidly than emotionally neutral expressions. However, it remains unclear whether this holds in older adults. We investigated this by comparing the abilities of young and older adults to detect emotional and neutral facial expressions while controlling the visual properties of faces presented (termed anti-expressions) in a visual search task. Both age groups detected normal angry faces more rapidly than anti-angry faces. However, whereas young adults detected normal happy faces more rapidly than anti-happy faces, older adults did not. This suggests that older adults may not be easy to detect or focusing attention towards smiling faces appearing peripherally.
以往基于视觉搜索范式的实验心理学研究报告称，与情绪中性表情相比，年轻人能更快地检测到情绪化面部表情。然而，这在老年人中是否成立仍不清楚。我们通过比较年轻人和老年人在视觉搜索任务中检测情绪性和中性面部表情的能力来对此进行研究，同时控制所呈现面部的视觉属性（称为反表情）。两个年龄组检测正常愤怒面孔的速度都比反愤怒面孔更快。然而，年轻人检测正常快乐面孔的速度比反快乐面孔更快，而老年人则不然。这表明老年人可能不容易检测到或将注意力集中在周边出现的笑脸。
