Comment on "Facial expression recognition in older adults with depression: A meta-analytic review"

We comment on the recent meta-analysis examining facial expression recognition (FER) in older adults with major depressive disorder (MDD). While the study provides an important quantitative synthesis at the intersection of socioemotional aging and depression, several interpretative and methodological issues merit clarification. First, negative standardized mean differences were interpreted in parts of the discussion as reflecting heightened sensitivity to negative emotions, although reduced accuracy in forced-choice paradigms more directly indicates impaired decoding rather than hypersensitivity. Second, substantial heterogeneity was markedly reduced only after exclusion of influential studies, raising concerns that pooled effects may be contingent on study selection and potentially reflect methodological compression. Third, meta-regression findings suggest that sample size and stimulus modality meaningfully influence effect estimates, underscoring design-related variability. Finally, cognitive status was not formally modeled as a moderator, despite its potential relevance to emotion recognition performance in late-life depression. We suggest that clearer differentiation between perceptual deficit and interpretative bias, alongside greater attention to methodological and cognitive moderators, would strengthen theoretical inference and future meta-analytic work in this domain.