Aging is associated with positive responding to neutral information but reduced recovery from negative information

Studies on aging and emotion suggest an increase in reported positive affect, a processing bias of positive over negative information, as well as increasingly adaptive regulation in response to negative events with advancing age. These findings imply that older individuals evaluate information differently, resulting in lowered reactivity to, and/or faster recovery from, negative information, while maintaining more positive responding to positive information. We examined this hypothesis in an ongoing study on Midlife in the US (MIDUS II) where emotional reactivity and recovery were assessed in a large number of respondents (N = 159) from a wide age range (36–84 years). We recorded eye-blink startle magnitudes and corrugator activity during and after the presentation of positive, neutral and negative pictures. The most robust age effect was found in response to neutral stimuli, where increasing age is associated with a decreased corrugator and eyeblink startle response to neutral stimuli. These data suggest that an age-related positivity effect does not essentially alter the response to emotion-laden information, but is reflected in a more positive interpretation of affectively ambiguous information. Furthermore, older women showed reduced corrugator recovery from negative pictures relative to the younger women and men, suggesting that an age-related prioritization of well-being is not necessarily reflected in adaptive regulation of negative affect

Impact of Expressive Wrinkles on Perception of a Virtual Character’s Facial Expressions of Emotions

Facial animation has reached a high level of photorealism. Skin is rendered with grain and translucency, wrinkles are accurate and dynamic. These recent visual improvements are not fully tested for their contribution to the perceived expressiveness of virtual characters. This paper presents a perceptual study assessing the impact of different rendering modes of expressive wrinkles on users’ perception of facial expressions of basic and complex emotions. Our results suggest that realistic wrinkles increase agent’s expressivity and user’s preference, but not the recognition of emotion categories. This study was conducted using our real time facial animation platform that is designed for perceptive evaluations of affective interaction

Effective regulation of the experience and expression of negative affect in old age

We investigated age differences in the experience and expression of emotion in 64 younger and 62 older adults. By manipulating emotion-regulation instructions, we investigated the effects of age on the control of both the inner experience and the outward expression of emotion. We predicted that there would be age improvements in regulating the inner experience of emotion. Indeed, our results indicated that older adults were more effective than young adults in following instructions to reduce the early experience of negative emotion. There were no age differences in following another emotion-regulation strategy involving the suppression of emotional display. In contrast to the well-documented difficulties in cognitive regulation of other studies, these data suggest that the ability to control experience and expression of emotions operates effectively in older adulthood. Copyright 2008 by The Gerontological Society of America