Facial- and postural-affect recognition in senile elderly persons

Sixteen senile geriatric inpatients were tested for visual affect recognition under four conditions. In the first three conditions, they were presented with different sets of happy, sad and angry facial stimuli. In the fourth condition, postural sketches were used to express the three emotions. The subjects were tested by means of verbal prompting, i.e., they were directed to point to either the happy, sad or angry facial and bodily expressions over a series of trials. Significantly more errors were made to the angry expressions than to the happy and sad ones which, in turn, did not differ from one another. In addition, significantly more errors were generated by the facial stimuli than by the postural representations. These findings suggested a mechanism underlying prosopo-affective agnosia.