Visual and auditory affect recognition in senile and normal elderly persons

Senile patients were compared to normal elderly people for visual and auditory affect recognition. The study consisted of eight conditions, with the subjects prompted verbally to point to happy, sad and angry pictures in the first five. The pictures consisted of expressive faces, expressive postures with blank faces and matching facial and postural expressions in Conditions 1-3, respectively. The facial and postural expressions conflicted in Conditions 4 and 5, with the facial expressions redundant in Condition 4 and the postures redundant in Condition 5. Conditions 6 and 7 were the same as the first two, except that the subjects were prompted by use of taped, affective voice intonations. In Condition 8, the subjects were requested to identify each of the affectively intoned prompts. The findings revealed a consistent level difference between the groups, with the senile elderly demonstrating both visual and auditory affective agnosia. These impairments in emotional recognition were affect-specific and they tended to confound one another. Finally, there was a subgroup of normals that was somewhat deficient in visual and auditory affect recognition.