ORCID Profile
0000-0002-0988-3028
Current Organisation
University of Aberdeen
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Psychology | Developmental Psychology and Ageing | Learning, Memory, Cognition And Language | Developmental Psychology And Ageing | Computer Perception, Memory and Attention
Health Related to Ageing | Expanding Knowledge in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences | Health related to ageing | Behavioural and cognitive sciences | Health Status (e.g. Indicators of Well-Being) |
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 08-2010
DOI: 10.1037/A0019152
Abstract: Gaze direction influences younger adults' perception of emotional expressions, with direct gaze enhancing the perception of anger and joy, while averted gaze enhances the perception of fear. Age-related declines in emotion recognition and eye-gaze processing have been reported, indicating that there may be age-related changes in the ability to integrate these facial cues. As there is evidence of a positivity bias with age, age-related difficulties integrating these cues may be greatest for negative emotions. The present research investigated age differences in the extent to which gaze direction influenced explicit perception (e.g., anger, fear and joy Study 1) and social judgments (e.g., of approachability Study 2) of emotion faces. Gaze direction did not influence the perception of fear in either age group. In both studies, age differences were found in the extent to which gaze direction influenced judgments of angry and joyful faces, with older adults showing less integration of gaze and emotion cues than younger adults. Age differences were greatest when interpreting angry expressions. Implications of these findings for older adults' social functioning are discussed.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2012
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 04-2009
DOI: 10.1037/A0014855
Abstract: This study examined the effect of mood states on mind wandering. Positive, neutral, and negative moods were induced in participants prior to them completing a sustained attention task. Mind wandering was measured by using the frequencies of both behavioral lapses and retrospective indices of subjective experience. Relative to a positive mood, induction of a negative mood led participants to make more lapses, report a greater frequency of task irrelevant thoughts, and become less inclined to reengage attentional resources following a lapse. Positive mood, by contrast, was associated with a better ability to adjust performance after a lapse. These results provide further support for the notion that a negative mood reduces the amount of attentional commitment to the task in hand and may do so by enhancing the focus on task irrelevant personal concerns.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2010
DOI: 10.1080/17470211003770920
Abstract: Cue saliency is known to influence prospective memory performance, whereby perceptually or conceptually distinct cues facilitate remembering and attenuate adult age-related deficits. The present study investigated whether similar benefits for older adults are also seen for emotional valence. A total of 41 older and 41 younger adults performed a prospective memory task in which the emotional valence of the prospective memory cues was manipulated. Emotionally valenced cues increased prospective memory performance across both groups. Age deficits were only observed when neutral (but not positive or negative) prospective cues were presented. Findings are consistent with predictions that salient cues facilitate participants’ prospective memory performance and reduce age-related differences, while extending the concept of saliency to include emotional valence.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 03-2020
DOI: 10.1037/PAG0000441
Abstract: Relative to their young counterparts, older adults are poorer at recognizing facial expressions. A 2008 meta-analysis of 17 facial emotion recognition data sets showed that these age-related difficulties are not uniform. Rather, they are greatest for the emotions of anger, fear, and sadness, comparative with happiness and surprise, with no age-effect found for disgust. Since then, there have been many methodological advances in assessing emotion recognition. The current comprehensive meta-analysis systematically tested the influence of task characteristics (e.g., photographs vs. videos). The meta-analysis included 102 data sets that compared facial emotion recognition in older and young adult s les (
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-2012
DOI: 10.1080/13803395.2012.670388
Abstract: Cognitive impairments in multiple sclerosis (MS) extend to tasks demanding prospective memory (PM): remembering to perform an intended act during ongoing activity. This study investigated whether emotional content influenced the effects of MS on PM, following evidence that emotional valence can influence other aspects of memory. Thirty participants with MS were compared to 30 controls on a PM task, Virtual Week, in which emotion was manipulated. People with MS showed a consistent deficit in PM performance across manipulations of task and valence. Results indicated that emotionally positive tasks improved the PM performance of MS participants, with implications for rehabilitation.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-2010
DOI: 10.1080/17470210903521797
Abstract: Previous research has identified “the age–prospective memory paradox”—that adult ageing results in reliably poorer performance on laboratory-based tasks of prospective memory (PM), but improved performance on such tasks carried out in real-life settings. We hypothesized that even in their everyday environment, older adults might be worse at PM tasks that are triggered during an experimenter-generated ongoing activity. The present study used a task that captured the key features of the classic laboratory paradigm, but which was completed in a setting that met key criteria to be considered naturalistic. In their everyday setting, participants’ PM was assessed, with the cue to remember occurring either (a) during their day-to-day activities, or (b) during an experimenter-generated ongoing task. The results confirmed previous naturalistic findings, in showing that older adults ( n = 28) exhibited better PM than their younger counterparts ( n = 65) when prompted during their everyday activities. However, older adults were also then subsequently less likely to show effective PM during experimenter-generated ongoing activity. Reproducing the paradox within a single dataset, these data indicate that older adults can effectively act on intentions during everyday activities, but have difficulty in prospective remembering during experimenter-generated ongoing tasks.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 07-07-2005
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2008
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA.2007.12.012
Abstract: The neural substrates that subserve decoding of different emotional expressions are subject to different rates of degeneration and atrophy in Alzheimer's disease (AD), and there is therefore reason to anticipate that a differentiated profile of affect recognition impairment may emerge. However, it remains unclear whether AD differentially affects the recognition of specific emotions. Further, there is only limited research focused on whether affect recognition deficits in AD generalize to more ecologically valid stimuli. In the present study, relatively mild AD participants (n=24), older controls (n=30) and younger controls (n=30) were administered measures of affect recognition. Significant AD deficits were observed relative to both the younger and older control groups on a measure that involved labeling of static images of facial affect. AD deficits on this measure were observed in relation to all emotions assessed (anger, sadness, happiness, surprise and fear), with the exception of disgust, which was preserved even relative to the younger adult group. The relative preservation of disgust could not be attributed to biases in the choice of labels made, and it is suggested instead that this finding might reflect the relative sparing of the basal ganglia in AD. No significant AD effect was observed for the more ecologically valid measure that involved dynamic displays of facial expressions, in conjunction with paralinguistic and body movement cues, although a trend for greater AD difficulty was observed.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-2009
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2006
Abstract: Standard measures of phonemic and semantic fluency, as well as fluency measures that impose additional demands upon set-switching were administered to younger and older adults. No age effect was found for total output on semantic fluency, while older participants generated significantly more responses relative to their younger counterparts on the phonemic measure. However, older adults made significantly more perseverative errors on both these measures. For tests of alternating fluency, only where participants were required to switch between two semantic dimensions, was an age deficit observed. Although the correlation between phonemic repetitions and age remained significant when performance on the Digit Symbol Test or a measure of fluid intelligence was partialled out, age effects for semantic repetitions and semantic alternating fluency were substantially reduced. The age benefit for number of correct responses upon phonemic fluency was significantly attenuated when a measure of crystallized intelligence was entered as a control variable. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-2016
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1054294
Abstract: Episodic future thinking (EFT), the ability to project into the future to “preexperience” an event, and prospective memory (PM), remembering to perform an intended action, are both ex les of future-oriented cognition. Recently it has been suggested that EFT might contribute to PM performance but to date few studies have examined the relationship between these two capacities. The aim of the present study was to investigate the nature and specificity of this relationship, as well as whether it varies with age. Participants were 125 younger and 125 older adults who completed measures of EFT and PM. Significant, positive correlations between EFT and PM were identified in both age groups. Furthermore, EFT ability accounted for significant unique variance in the young adults, suggesting that it may make a specific contribution to PM function. Within the older adult group, EFT did not uniquely contribute to PM, possibly indicating a reduced capacity to utilize EFT, or the use of compensatory strategies. This study is the first to provide systematic evidence for an association between variation in EFT and PM abilities in both younger and older adulthood and shows that the nature of this association varies as a function of age.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2014
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA.2013.12.024
Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM) refers broadly to our understanding of others' complex emotions and mental states. Deficits in ToM are widely regarded as one of the key defining features of the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), which is unsurprising given the key role that frontal and temporal neural systems are considered to play in mental state decoding. Here we report the first meta-analysis of this literature, providing a timely summary of the breadth, magnitude and specificity of ToM difficulties in this population. Across 15 datasets involving 800 participants (312 with bvFTD and for comparative purposes, 325 non-clinical controls and 163 participants with Alzheimer's disease), several key results emerged. Collapsed across all types of task, people with bvFTD performed more poorly than non-clinical controls, with the degree of ToM difficulty they experienced large in magnitude (r=-.60). These deficits were greater than those observed on control tasks matched to the ToM task in their general cognitive demands, but which can be solved without any mentalistic inference. BvFTD-related ToM difficulties were also significantly larger than the ToM difficulties seen in people with Alzheimer's disease. However, ToM difficulties in people with bvFTD were of a similar magnitude to the difficulties seen on measures of more basic social cue perception (emotion recognition). These data have important implications for understanding the types of ToM difficulties associated with bvFTD.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2013
DOI: 10.1037/A0030677
Abstract: Age-related difficulties in understanding basic emotional signals are now well established, but less clear is how aging affects theory of mind (ToM), which refers to the understanding of more complex emotions and mental states. A meta-analysis of 23 datasets involving 1462 (790 younger and 672 older) participants was conducted in which six basic types of ToM task were identified (Stories, Eyes, Videos, False belief-video, False belief-other, and Faux pas). Each ToM task was also categorized according to domain (affective, cognitive, or mixed) and modality (verbal, visual-static, visual-dynamic, verbal and visual-static, or verbal and visual-dynamic). Overall, collapsed across all types of task, older adults were found to perform more poorly than younger adults, with the degree of ToM difficulty they experienced moderate in magnitude (r = -.41). The results also provide evidence for increased ToM difficulties in late adulthood regardless of specific task parameters, with deficits evident across all task types, domains, and modalities. With few exceptions, age deficits for ToM tasks were larger in magnitude compared with matched control tasks. These data have implications for our understanding of mental state attribution processes in late adulthood, suggesting that ToM difficulties are not simply secondary to non-ToM related task demands.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2016
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUROBIOLAGING.2016.08.026
Abstract: 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 ex le, 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.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2006
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA.2005.04.011
Abstract: Changes in emotional and social behaviour are considered to be amongst the most common and debilitating consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Little is known of the effects of TBI on alexithymia, which refers to impairment in aspects of understanding emotions. In the current study TBI patients (N=28) were compared with demographically matched healthy controls (N=31) on the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20), a measure that taps three distinct characteristics of the alexithymia concept difficulty in identifying emotions, difficulty in describing emotions and externally oriented thinking. Patients and controls also completed measures of anxiety, depression, quality of life, and measures of fluency to assess executive function. Patients showed greater levels of alexithymia, in terms of difficulty identifying emotions and reduced introspection. Difficulty in identifying emotions was associated with poorer quality of life, even when depression and anxiety were controlled. Difficulty in identifying emotions was also uniquely associated with executive function deficits. Thus, although studies typically focus on aspects of cognitive change following head injury, these results lend support to Becerra et al.'s (Becerra, R., Amos, A., & Jongenelis, S. (2002). Organic alexithymia: a study of acquired emotional blindness. Brain Injury, 16, 633-645.) notion of an 'organic alexithymia', and suggest that more attention should be focused upon assessment of emotional change post-head injury.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 13-06-2010
Abstract: Previous research revealed age differences in following the gaze of others. To date, however, investigations have concentrated on only young faces as target stimuli. The present study explored whether varying the age of target stimuli moderated gaze following in younger and older adults. Overall, older participants showed less evidence of gaze following, but this was qualified by the age of the face viewed. Younger participants showed an own-age bias, following the gaze cues of stimuli depicting those in their own age range to a greater extent than stimuli depicting older adults. However, a similar own-age effect was not found for older participants. These findings suggest that age differences in gaze following may be driven by younger participants having an advantage for processing the gaze cues from the faces of younger adults, highlighting the importance of varying the age of the target stimuli when assessing age differences in some aspects of social perception.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2004
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 14-01-2019
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2009
DOI: 10.1037/A0014001
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with intact experience but abnormal expression of emotion. Because emotion regulation is important in determining levels of experienced and expressed emotion, in iduals with AD and control participants were asked to watch film clips under conditions of spontaneous expression, suppression, or lification of emotion. Both groups had difficulties with behavioral lification that were related to performance on a measure of theory of mind. However, intentional use of suppression was intact even for those with AD, consistent with models of aging that regard some emotion control processes as being relatively more automatic in older adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-06-2007
DOI: 10.1080/13803390600762717
Abstract: A quantitative review indicated that prospective memory impairment is a consistent feature of traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, evidence also suggests that manipulations that increase demands on controlled attentional processes moderate the magnitude of observed deficits. A total of 16 TBI participants were compared with 15 matched controls on a task in which the number of prospective target events was manipulated. This manipulation was of interest because two competing models make different predictions as to its effect on controlled attentional processes. In the context of Smith and Bayen's (2004) preparatory attentional processes and memory processes (PAM) model increasing the number of target events should increase requirements for controlled attentional processing. In contrast, McDaniel and Einstein's (2000) multiprocess framework assumes that distinct target events presented in focal awareness of the processing activities required for the ongoing task are likely to depend on automatic processes. This latter model therefore leads to the prediction that increasing the number of target events should not increase demands upon controlled attentional processes. Consistent with McDaniel and Einstein's (2000) multiprocess framework, TBI patients were significantly and comparably impaired on the one- and the four-target-event conditions relative to controls. Further, TBI deficits could not be attributed to increased difficulty with the retrospective component of the prospective memory task. The practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2008
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUBIOREV.2008.01.001
Abstract: This meta-analysis of 28 data sets (N=705 older adults, N=962 younger adults) examined age differences in emotion recognition across four modalities: faces, voices, bodies/contexts, and matching of faces to voices. The results indicate that older adults have increased difficulty recognising at least some of the basic emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness) in each modality, with some emotions (anger and sadness) and some modalities (face-voice matching) creating particular difficulties. The predominant pattern across all emotions and modalities was of age-related decline with the exception that there was a trend for older adults to be better than young adults at recognising disgusted facial expressions. These age-related changes are examined in the context of three theoretical perspectives-positivity effects, general cognitive decline, and more specific neuropsychological change in the social brain. We argue that the pattern of age-related change observed is most consistent with a neuropsychological model of adult aging stemming from changes in frontal and temporal volume, and/or changes in neurotransmitters.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 12-2021
DOI: 10.1037/BUL0000353
Abstract: Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others' eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets that are presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multilevel approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of the assessed task and cue features, indicating that others' eye gaze reliably directs observers' attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets and the cue's facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2011
DOI: 10.1016/J.COGNITION.2011.05.003
Abstract: Older adults often perform poorly on Theory of Mind (ToM) tests that require understanding of others' beliefs and intentions. The course and specificity of age changes in belief reasoning across the adult lifespan is unclear, as is the cause of the age effects. Cognitive and neuropsychological models predict that two types of processing might influence age differences in belief reasoning: executive functioning and social cue detection. In the current study we assessed 129 adults aged between 18 and 86 on novel measures of ToM (video clips and verbal vignettes), which manipulated whether true or false belief reasoning was required. On both video and verbal tasks, older adults (aged 65-88) had specific impairments in false belief reasoning, but showed no such problem in performing true belief tasks. Middle-aged adults (aged 40-64) generally performed as well as the younger adults (aged 18-39). Difficulties in updating information in working memory (but not inhibitory problems) partially mediated the age differences in false belief reasoning. Also, the ability to decode biological motion, indexing social cue detection, partially mediated age-related variance in the ability to interpret false beliefs. These results indicate that age differences in decoding social cues and updating information in memory may be important influences on the specific problems encountered when reasoning about false beliefs in old age.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2011
DOI: 10.1037/A0020752
Abstract: Multiple sclerosis (MS) often results in demyelination of a network of frontal-subcortical tracts involved in processing emotional information. We investigated the effect of MS on the ability to identify emotional and nonemotional information from static and dynamic stimuli and determined whether difficulties in emotion perception related to quality of life. 32 MS and 33 control participants, matched for age and education, identified emotions and nonemotional information from static images of faces and dynamic videos of people interacting. They also completed cognitive assessment and quality of life ratings. On the static face perception tasks, participants with MS performed more poorly than healthy controls on emotion perception, t(63) = 3.30, p < .01, d = .83, but not identity perception, t(63) = 1.18, d = .30. For the dynamic tasks, the MS group were impaired on emotion perception, t(63) = 3.41, p = .001, d = .86, but not age/gender perception, t(63) = 0.15, d = .04. Ratings of social and psychological aspects of quality of life in MS were related to emotion perception scores, controlling for disease severity and duration, age, depression, and cognitive function, with r2 ranging from .17 to .24. These results indicate a specific deficit in decoding static and dynamic information about emotion in MS, as compared to nonemotional information. There were specific relationships between emotion perception problems and poor social and psychological quality of life, indicating that emotional skills should be considered when evaluating functioning in MS.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 05-2004
DOI: 10.1093/BRAIN/AWH045
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2012
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2011.651091
Abstract: Prior research indicates that, in some circumstances, reminders may facilitate prospective remembering. However, it remains unclear whether this effect is dependent on the initiation source (self vs. external), whether it is moderated by task type (event vs. time based), or whether the provision of standardized reminders particularly benefits older adults. In the current study, young ( n = 48) and older adults ( n = 47) were tested on a laboratory-based prospective memory task in which they encountered three counterbalanced reminder conditions: no reminders, self-initiated reminders, and experimenter-initiated reminders. The results indicated that while the provision of reminders enhanced prospective memory performance, no difference was seen between self-initiated and experimenter-initiated reminder conditions, nor was there any interaction with age or prospective memory type (event vs. time based). These data support the role of both self- and externally generated external reminders as an aid to prospective remembering. However, the absence of any interaction with age is not consistent with theoretical models of ageing that consider the provision of such reminders to reduce strategic demands (or increase automatic processing).
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 08-2011
Abstract: Research indicates that the most commonly held belief about deception is that people avert their gaze when lying. The present study assessed adult age-related differences in both the association between averted gaze and judgments of deception and the strength of the "deceiver stereotype." In Study 1, younger and older adult participants were required to decide if in iduals displaying direct gaze or differing degrees of gaze aversion were lying or telling the truth. In Study 2, a group of younger and older adults were explicitly asked about their beliefs concerning how different behaviors related to deception. Findings revealed that, compared with younger participants, when asked to decide whether in iduals were lying, older adults were less likely to associate direct gaze with honesty and averted gaze with deception. This effect was not due to age-related differences in the strength of the deceiver stereotype, as when explicitly asked, both younger and older participants associated averted gaze with lying. These findings provide further evidence of age-related differences in the ability to extract socially relevant information from the eye region, which might relate to changes in visual scanning of facial features with age.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 26-02-2004
DOI: 10.1093/BRAIN/AWH087
Publisher: Psychology Press
Date: 16-10-2007
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2015
DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.956127
Abstract: Efficient intention formation might improve prospective memory by reducing the need for resource-demanding strategic processes during the delayed performance interval. The present study set out to test this assumption and provides the first empirical assessment of whether imagining a future action improves prospective memory performance equivalently at different stages of the adult lifespan. Thus, younger ( n = 40) and older ( n = 40) adults were asked to complete the Dresden Breakfast Task, which required them to prepare breakfast in accordance with a set of rules and time restrictions. All participants began by generating a plan for later enactment however, after making this plan, half of the participants were required to imagine themselves completing the task in the future (future thinking condition), while the other half received standard instructions (control condition). As expected, overall younger adults outperformed older adults. Moreover, both older and younger adults benefited equally from future thinking instructions, as reflected in a higher proportion of prospective memory responses and more accurate plan execution. Thus, for both younger and older adults, imagining the specific visual–spatial context in which an intention will later be executed may serve as an easy-to-implement strategy that enhances prospective memory function in everyday life.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-2011
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2010.508610
Abstract: Emotional factors have been found to be an important influence on memory. The current study investigated the influence of emotional salience and age on a laboratory measure of prospective memory (PM) Virtual Week. Thirty young and 30 old adults completed Virtual Week, in which the emotional salience of the tasks at encoding was manipulated to be positive, negative or neutral in content. For event-based, but not time-based tasks, positivity enhancement in both age groups was seen, with a greater number of positive PM tasks being performed relative to neutral tasks. There was no negativity enhancement effect. Older adults showed generally poorer levels of PM, but they also demonstrated greater beneficial effects of positive valence compared to young. These effects of emotion on PM accuracy do not appear to reflect the retrospective component of the task as a different pattern of emotion effects was seen on the recall of PM content. Results indicate that older adults' difficulties in prospective remembering can be reduced where the tasks to be remembered are positive.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2008
DOI: 10.1016/J.COGNITION.2007.07.015
Abstract: Conflicting evidence has arisen from correlational studies regarding the role of executive control functions in Theory of Mind. The current study used dual-task manipulations of executive functions (inhibition, updating and switching) to investigate the role of these control functions in mental state and non-mental state tasks. The 'Eyes' pictorial test of Theory of Mind showed specific dual-task costs when concurrently performed with an inhibitory secondary task. In contrast, interference effects on a verbal 'Stories' task were general, occurring on both mental state and non-mental state tasks, and across all types of executive function. These findings from healthy functioning adults should help to guide decisions about appropriate methods of assessing ToM in clinical populations, and interpreting deficits in performance in such tasks in the context of more general cognitive dysfunction.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-11-2013
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2013.839438
Abstract: The present study explored own-age biases in deception detection, investigating whether in iduals were more likely to trust those in their own-age group. Younger and older participants were asked to detect deceit from videos of younger and older speakers, rating their confidence in each decision. Older participants showed an own-age bias: they were more likely to think that deceptive speakers of their own age, relative to younger speakers, were telling the truth. Older participants were also more confident in their judgements of own-age, relative to other-age, speakers. There were no own-age biases for younger participants. In a subsequent (apparently unrelated) task, participants were asked to rate the trustworthiness of the speakers. Both age groups of participants trusted younger speakers who had previously told the truth more compared to those who had lied. This effect was not found for older speakers. These findings are considered in relation to the in-group/out-group model of social cognition and common stereotypical beliefs held about younger and older adults.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-2006
DOI: 10.1080/13607860500310385
Abstract: Emotion regulation has been argued to be an important factor in well-being. The current study investigated the effects of adult aging on emotional expression, emotional control and rumination about emotional events, focusing on an emotion which is particularly important in social interaction: anger. Measures of anger regulation and well-being were obtained in a s le of 286 adults aged between 18 and 88. Older adults expressed anger outwardly less often, and reported more inner control of anger using calming strategies compared to their younger counterparts. These age differences were not explained by variance in social desirability of responding. Age improvements in negative affect and anxiety were partly explained by age differences in anger regulation suggesting an important role for anger management in good mental health amongst older adults. Further, age improvements in quality of life were explained by variance in anger regulation indicating that improved management of emotions with age is an important factor in maintaining well-being in old age.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 03-2010
DOI: 10.1037/A0018248
Abstract: The present study investigated age-related changes in the ability to discriminate between distinctions in the emotion underlying enjoyment and nonenjoyment smiles, both when making explicit decisions about feelings of happiness and when making social judgments of approachability. No age differences were found in the ability to discriminate between these two types of smile. However, older adults demonstrated a greater bias toward reporting that any smiling in idual was feeling happy. Older adults were also more likely to choose to approach an in idual who was displaying a nonenjoyment smile. Implications of these findings for older adults' interpersonal functioning are discussed.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2014
DOI: 10.1037/A0036389
Abstract: The present study examined age-by-mood interactions in prospective memory and the potential role of attentional control. Positive, negative, or neutral mood was induced in young and older adults. Subsequent time-based prospective memory performance was tested, incorporating a measure of online attentional control shifts between the ongoing and the prospective memory task via time monitoring behavior. Mood impaired prospective memory in the young, but not older, adults. Moderated mediation analyses showed that mood effects in the young were mediated by changes in time monitoring. Results are discussed in relation to findings from the broader cognitive emotional aging literature.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 09-2007
DOI: 10.1037/0882-7974.22.3.639
Abstract: Tasks assessing theory of mind (ToM) and non-mental state control tasks were administered to young and older adults to examine previous contradictory findings about age differences in mental state decoding. Age differences were found on a verbal ToM task after controlling for vocabulary levels. Older adults achieved significantly lower scores than did younger adults on static and dynamic visual ToM tasks, and a similar pattern was found on non-ToM control tasks. Rather than a specific ToM deficit, older adults exhibited a more general impairment in the ability to decode cues from verbal and visual information about people.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2002
Abstract: Contrasting predictions have been made about the effects of positive mood states on the performance of frontal lobe tests that tap executive functions such as inhibition, switching, and strategy use. It has been argued that positive mood is likely to improve some cognitive processes, particularly those dependent on the frontal cortex and anterior cingulate of the brain. However, there is some evidence that happy mood may impair executive functioning. The current experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on Stoop and fluency tests, which are frequently used to assess executive function. Positive mood impaired performance on a switching condition of the Stroop test, but improved performance on a creative uses test of fluency. The effect of positive mood on an executive task may therefore depend on whether a task is inherently motivating or is impaired by diffuse semantic activation.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 02-11-2017
Abstract: Older adults have difficulties in identifying most facial expressions of emotion. However, most aging studies have presented static photographs of intense expressions, whereas in everyday experience people see emotions that develop and change. The present study was designed to assess whether age-related difficulties with emotion recognition are reduced when more ecologically valid (i.e., dynamic) stimuli are used. We examined the effect of stimuli format (i.e., static vs. dynamic) on facial affect recognition in two separate studies that included independent s les and distinct stimuli sets. In addition to younger and older participants, a middle-aged group was included in Study 1 and eye gaze patterns were assessed in Study 2. Across both studies, older adults performed worse than younger adults on measures of facial affect recognition. In Study 1, older and-middle aged adults benefited from dynamic stimuli, but only when the emotional displays were subtle. Younger adults gazed more at the eye region of the face relative to older adults (Study 2), but dynamic presentation increased attention towards the eye region for younger adults only. Together, these studies provide important and novel insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may be expected to experience difficulties in perceiving facial emotions.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2004
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2006
DOI: 10.1016/J.JPSYCHORES.2005.09.008
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to test the validity of existing conceptualizations of the alexithymia concept, with particular reference to aging. Two hundred and forty-eight healthy adults completed measures of alexithymia and psychosocial functioning younger and older adults (n=121) also completed a measure of emotional responsiveness. Older adults engaged in less introspective thought traditionally thought to denote increased alexithymia. However, reduced introspection was associated with improved mental wellbeing, and, thus, could not be construed as a deficit. Difficulty identifying and describing emotions did not differentiate older and younger adults, but were both associated with heightened depression, anxiety, and poor perceived quality of life. In clinical practice and research, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) is almost exclusively used, with "total" score typically used to index alexithymia. As one of the subscales of the TAS measures reduced introspection, calculating total scores may not be appropriate and may particularly overestimate levels of alexithymia in older adulthood.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 03-2009
DOI: 10.1017/S1355617709090195
Abstract: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a white matter disease associated with neurocognitive difficulties. More recently the potential for white matter pathology to also disrupt important aspects of emotion understanding has been recognized. However, no study to date has assessed whether capacity for facial affect recognition and theory of mind (ToM) is disrupted in MS, or whether any observed deficits are related to more general cognitive impairment. In the present study MS participants ( n = 27) and nonclinical controls ( n = 30) were administered measures of facial affect recognition, ToM, and cognitive functioning. MS participants were significantly impaired on the ToM task, and also presented with specific deficits decoding facial emotions of anger and fear. Performance on the measures of facial affect recognition and ToM were related to general cognitive functioning, and in particular, measures sensitive to executive dysfunction and information processing speed. These data highlight the need for future research to more fully delineate the extent and implications of emotion understanding difficulties in this population. ( JINS , 2009, 15 , 277–285.)
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 03-2010
DOI: 10.1037/A0017369
Abstract: Difficulties in understanding emotional signals might have important implications for social interactions in old age. In this study we investigated emotion perception skills involved in decoding facial expressions of emotion in healthy older adults, compared with those with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or late-life mood disorder (MD). Although those with MD were mildly impaired in identifying emotional expressions, this was not caused by negative biases in choosing labels. Emotion decoding performance in AD was much more impaired, particularly when relatively subtle expressions were presented. Difficulties in choosing between labels to describe an emotional face were predicted by executive dysfunction, whereas impaired ability to match 2 emotional faces was related to general difficulties with face perception. Across all 3 groups, problems with emotion perception predicted quality of life independently of variance predicted by cognitive function and mood, indicating the potential importance of emotion decoding skills in the well-being of older adults.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-08-2018
Abstract: Age-related differences on theory of mind (ToM) tasks are well established. However, the literature has been criticised for predominantly relying on tasks with poor ecological validity, and consequently it remains unclear whether these age differences extend to tasks with greater realism. In addition, we currently have a limited understanding of the factors that may contribute to age-related declines in ToM. To address these issues, we conducted two studies that assessed age differences in ToM using multimodal social scene stimuli. Study 1 also examined eye movements to assess whether biases in visual attention may be related to age-related difficulties in ToM, and Study 2 included an assessment of social attention (as indexed by biological motion perception) and working memory to assess whether these capacities may explain age difficulties in ToM. In both studies, the results showed that older adults performed worse than their younger counterparts on the ToM tasks, indicating that age-related difficulties in ToM extend to measures that more closely represent everyday social interactions. The eye-tracking data in Study 1 showed that older adults gazed less at the faces of protagonists in the social scenes compared with younger adults however, these visual biases were not associated with ToM ability. Study 2 showed that older age was associated with a reduced ability to detect biological motion cues, and this mediated age-related variance in ToM ability. These findings are discussed in relation to competing theoretical frameworks of ageing that predict either improvements or declines in ToM with age.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2005
DOI: 10.1037/0894-4105.19.2.243
Abstract: A meta-analysis of 30 studies with 1,511 participants was conducted to estimate and compare the magnitude of deficits on tests of phonemic and semantic fluency for patients with Huntington's disease (HD) relative to healthy control participants. As has been found for patients with focal frontal cortical lesions (but not for patients with focal temporal cortical lesions), symptomatic HD patients were comparably impaired on tests of phonemic and semantic fluency (rs=.71 and .73, respectively). However, in contrast to patients with focal frontal lobe injuries, fluency deficits did not qualify as differential deficits relative to verbal intelligence or psychomotor speed. Therefore, for patients with HD, deficits on tests of phonemic and semantic fluency do not appear to reflect executive dysfunction but a more generalized cognitive impairment.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 12-2015
DOI: 10.1037/DEV0000063
Abstract: Younger and older adults differ in performance on a range of social-cognitive skills, with older adults having difficulties in decoding nonverbal cues to emotion and intentions. Such skills are likely to be important when deciding whether someone is being sarcastic. In the current study we investigated in a life span s le whether there are age-related differences in the interpretation of sarcastic statements. Using both video and verbal materials, 116 participants aged between 18 and 86 completed judgments about whether statements should be interpreted literally or sarcastically. For the verbal stories task, older adults were poorer at understanding sarcastic intent compared with younger and middle-aged participants, but there was no age difference in interpreting control stories. For the video task, older adults showed poorer understanding of sarcastic exchanges compared with younger and middle-aged counterparts, but there was no age difference in understanding the meaning of sincere interactions. For the videos task, the age differences were mediated by the ability to perceive facial expressions of emotion. Age effects could not be explained in terms of variance in working memory. These results indicate that increased age is associated with specific difficulties in using nonverbal and contextual cues to understand sarcastic intent. (PsycINFO Database Record
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2008
DOI: 10.1037/A0014348
Abstract: Previous research has investigated age differences in complex social perception tasks such as theory of mind and emotion recognition, with predominant findings of age-related declines. The present study investigated whether there are also age-related changes in basic aspects of social perception. In iduals' ability both to detect subtle differences in eye-gaze direction (e.g., where someone is looking in the environment) and to subsequently use these gaze cues to engage in joint attention with others was assessed. Age-related declines were found in the detection of the most subtle differences in gaze aversion. The ability to engage in joint attention by following gaze cues also declined with age. These age differences were not solely attributable to age impairments in visual perception and visual attention. The potential role of age-related neural declines in social perception problems was considered, along with the implications that age deficits in these basic social skills may have for older adults' social perception.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2006
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA.2006.03.020
Abstract: A number of studies have now documented that traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with deficits in the recognition of basic emotions, the capacity to infer mental states of others (theory of mind), as well as executive functioning. However, no study to date has investigated the relationship between these three constructs in the context of TBI. In the current study TBI participants (N=16) were compared with demographically matched healthy controls (N=17). It was found that TBI participants' recognition of basic emotions, as well as their capacity for mental state attribution, was significantly reduced relative to controls. Performance on both of these measures was strongly correlated in the healthy control, but not in the TBI s le. In contrast, in the TBI (but not the control) s le, theory of mind was substantially correlated with performance on phonemic fluency, a measure of executive functioning considered to impose particular demands upon cognitive flexibility and self-regulation. These results are consistent with other evidence indicating that deficits in some aspects of executive functioning may at least partially underlie deficits in social cognition following TBI, and thus help explain the prevalence of social dysfunction in TBI.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 14-09-2014
DOI: 10.1080/13803395.2014.946891
Abstract: Little is known about the influence of multiple sclerosis (MS) on the regulation of emotion. The current study tested whether people with MS report more emotion regulation difficulties than healthy controls. The relationship between emotion regulation and other important variables (mood, quality of life, and executive function) was explored. Mediation models were used to further understand the links between emotion regulation, depressed mood, and executive function in MS. A total of 31 people with MS and 31 controls completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scales and measures of executive function (fluency and a go/no-go task), mood (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scales), and a multidimensional assessment of quality of life (World Health Organization Quality of Life, brief version). People with MS reported experiencing more difficulties in emotion regulation than controls. Mediation analyses indicated that depression mediated the emotion regulation difficulties in MS, while executive dysfunction did not. Difficulties in emotion regulation predicted poorer psychological and social quality of life in MS, independent of problems with executive function. People with MS experience difficulties in emotion regulation, which predict poorer quality of life. These results indicate that emotional control skills should be investigated in further detail when considering interventions to enhance well-being in MS.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 12-06-2012
DOI: 10.1017/S1355617712000665
Abstract: Participants diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), dementia and controls completed measures that required decoding emotions from point-light displays of bodily motion, and static images of facial affect. Both of these measures tap social cognitive processes that are considered critical for social competency. Consistent with prior literature, both clinical groups were impaired on the static measure of facial affect recognition. The dementia (but not the MCI) group additionally showed difficulties interpreting biological motion cues. However, this did not reflect a specific deficit in decoding emotions, but instead a more generalized difficulty in processing visual motion (both to action and to emotion). These results align with earlier studies showing that visual motion processing is disrupted in dementia, but additionally show for the first time that this extends to the recognition of socially relevant biological motion. The absence of any MCI related impairment on the point-light biological emotion measure (coupled with deficits on the measure of facial affect recognition) also point to a potential disconnect between the processes implicated in the perception of emotion cues from static versus dynamic stimuli. For clinical (but not control) participants, performance on all recognition measures was inversely correlated with level of semantic memory impairment. ( JINS , 2012, 18 , 1–8)
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2012
DOI: 10.1037/A0029748
Abstract: Episodic future thinking refers to mentally traveling forward in time to preexperience an event, and emerging research suggests that this is more difficult for older adults. The current study was designed to better understand the effect of aging on separate component processes of age differences in episodic future thinking. Young (n = 24) and older (n = 25) adults were asked to construct a) atemporal scenarios, b) future scenarios, and c) a narrative that involved navigation. Each of these conditions assesses the capacity to construct and describe a scene, but only the future scenario requires a subjective sense of self in time (autonoetic consciousness). The composite measure of performance showed that relative to young adults, older adults have substantially reduced capacity for all three types of construction, suggesting that age-related difficulty imagining future episodic events may reflect a more general cognitive decline with age. In addition, older adults were worse at imagining future experiences than atemporal experiences, indicating limited capacity for autonoetic consciousness. Further, this difference between imagining atemporal and future experiences was not as evident among younger adults. These deficits in episodic future thinking have implications for the daily lives of older adults in terms of anticipating and planning for the future.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 12-02-2022
Abstract: Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others’ eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze, has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multi-level approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of all assessed task and cue features, indicating that others’ eye gaze reliably directs observers’ attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not the cue-target Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets and the cue’s facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Start Date: 2011
End Date: 06-2014
Amount: $246,610.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2015
End Date: 05-2018
Amount: $256,300.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 04-2011
End Date: 03-2015
Amount: $330,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity