Department of Psychology, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand.
Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Block AS4, Level 2, 9 Arts Link, Singapore, 117570, Singapore.
Sci Rep. 2022 May 6;12(1):7408. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-11381-8.
Older adults and Easterners have worse emotion recognition (than young adults and Westerners, respectively), but the question of why remains unanswered. Older adults look less at eyes, whereas Easterners look less at mouths, raising the possibility that compelling older adults to look at eyes, and Easterners to look at mouths, might improve recognition. We did this by comparing emotion recognition in 108 young adults and 109 older adults from New Zealand and Singapore in the (a) eyes on their own (b) mouth on its own or (c) full face. Older adults were worse than young adults on 4/6 emotions with the Eyes Only stimuli, but only 1/6 emotions with the Mouth Only stimuli. In contrast, Easterners were worse than Westerners on 6/6 emotions for Mouth Only and Full Face stimuli, but were equal on all six emotions for Eyes Only stimuli. These results provide a substantial leap forward because they point to the precise difficulty for older adults and Easterners. Older adults have more consistent difficulty identifying individual emotions in the eyes compared to the mouth, likely due to declining brain functioning, whereas Easterners have more consistent difficulty identifying emotions from the mouth than the eyes, likely due to inexperience inferring mouth information.
老年人和东方人在情绪识别方面表现较差（分别比年轻人和西方人差），但原因仍未得到解答。老年人较少注视眼睛，而东方人较少注视嘴巴，这表明强迫老年人注视眼睛，以及强迫东方人注视嘴巴，可能会改善识别能力。我们通过比较来自新西兰和新加坡的 108 名年轻人和 109 名老年人在（a）单独注视眼睛、（b）单独注视嘴巴或（c）完整面部时的情绪识别情况来实现这一点。在仅用眼的刺激条件下，老年人在 6 种情绪中的 4 种上表现不如年轻人，但在仅用嘴的刺激条件下，老年人在 6 种情绪中的 1 种上表现不如年轻人。相比之下，在仅用嘴和完整面部的刺激条件下，东方人在 6 种情绪中都比西方人差，但在只用眼睛的刺激条件下，他们在 6 种情绪中表现相同。这些结果是一个重大突破，因为它们指出了老年人和东方人的确切困难所在。与嘴巴相比，老年人在识别眼睛中的个体情绪方面存在更一致的困难，这可能是由于大脑功能下降所致，而东方人在从嘴巴识别情绪方面存在更一致的困难，这可能是由于缺乏从嘴巴推断信息的经验所致。
