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Updated: May 21, 2026
14:04
Brain Imaging Investigation of the Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation
Published on: August 26, 2011
Cognitive aging explains age-related differences in face-based recognition of basic emotions except for anger and
Atsunobu Suzuki1, Hiroko Akiyama
1Department of Social and Human Environment, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan. atsuzuki@nagoya-u.jp
Summary
Cognitive aging significantly impacts facial emotion recognition, with general cognitive ability explaining deficits in recognizing happiness, surprise, fear, and sadness, but not anger or disgust.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive psychology
- Neuroscience of aging
- Human emotion recognition
Background:
- Cognitive aging is often perceived to have a minor, uniform effect on cognitive functions.
- Facial expression recognition is a crucial social cognition skill.
- The specific impact of cognitive aging on recognizing basic emotions requires detailed investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the dissociable influences of cognitive aging on the recognition of basic facial emotions.
- To determine if general cognitive ability mediates age-related deficits in emotion recognition.
Main Methods:
- Comparison of facial expression recognition accuracy between 36 older and 36 young adults.
- Administration of cognitive tasks assessing processing speed and fluid intelligence.
- Hierarchical regression analyses to link cognitive ability to emotion recognition performance.
Main Results:
- Age-related deficits in recognizing happiness, surprise, fear, and sadness were significantly explained by general cognitive ability.
- Differences in recognizing anger and disgust were not statistically explained by general cognitive ability.
- Cognitive aging differentially affects the recognition of basic emotions.
Conclusions:
- General cognitive ability plays a crucial role in age-related changes in emotion recognition.
- The impact of cognitive aging on facial expression recognition is not uniform across all basic emotions.
- Findings challenge the notion of a uniformly minor effect of cognitive aging on social cognition.
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