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Updated: Jun 23, 2026
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An Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effects of Ageing on Sentence Processing
Published on: October 25, 2019
The comprehensive affect testing system-abbreviated: effects of age on performance
Sarah G Schaffer1, Amy Wisniewski, Marie Dahdah
1Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, Palo Alto, CA, USA. sschaffer1@nshs.edu
Summary
Aging impacts emotion recognition, particularly with vocal cues (prosody) and combined sensory inputs (cross-modal tasks). Facial emotion recognition remained largely stable, highlighting the need for precise assessment tools.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Gerontology
Background:
- Emotion recognition is crucial for social interaction.
- Deficits in emotion perception are common in psychiatric and neurologic disorders.
- Standardized neuropsychological tools for assessing emotion perception are limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the effects of aging on emotion perception using the Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS).
- To assess age-related changes in recognizing emotions from facial affect, prosody, and semantic content.
- To determine if age-related declines in emotion recognition are linked to general fluid ability decline.
Main Methods:
- The Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS), a novel assessment battery, was administered.
- Participants' ability to perceive emotions from facial affect, prosody, and semantic content was measured.
- Statistical analyses examined the association between age and performance across different emotion perception modalities.
Main Results:
- No significant age-related decline was observed in overall facial emotion recognition.
- A significant age effect was found for the recognition of discrete emotions from facial cues.
- Performance on prosody and cross-modal emotion recognition tasks showed a strong decline with age.
- This decline in prosody and cross-modal tasks was independent of age-related decreases in fluid ability.
Conclusions:
- Standardized assessment of emotion recognition is essential.
- Aging significantly affects the ability to perceive emotions from vocal cues and integrated sensory information.
- Facial emotion recognition, especially for basic emotions, appears more resilient to aging compared to other modalities.
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