Own-Age Bias and Positivity Effects in Facial Recognition

Background/Study Context - In the current study, we evaluated two age-related differences in recognition memory: the own-age bias, wherein older and younger adults best recognize those of their own age group, and an age-related positivity effect, wherein older adults recall positive emotional information better than negative information relative to younger adults. We sought to extend previous research that jointly investigated these variables in recognition memory. Methods - Younger (age 18 - 27) and older (age 62 - 80) adults completed an incidental encoding task on a sequence of 50 positive, negative, or neutrally valenced images of older and younger adult faces. After a distractor task, participants made forced-choice recognition judgments and rated their decision confidence for images that were repeated with the same or a different emotional expression, and for novel, previously unseen faces. Results - Older and younger adults' recognition discriminability did not differ significantly between age groups. Notably, the data indicated an own-age bias in young adults, but not in older adults, and both age groups' recognition accuracy was greatest for faces that had originally been shown with a positive emotional expression. Conclusion - To our knowledge, this research is the first to demonstrate an own-age recognition bias in younger adults for emotional faces. Although our predictions of a differential impact by emotional faces on recognition of same and other-age faces were not supported, we identify a number of factors that contextualize these findings in the recent literature.