Facial and auditory affect recognition in senile geriatrics, the normal elderly and young adults

A group of young adults, normal elderly, and senile people were tested for the recognition of facial, auditory and musical affect, as well as nonemotional voice inflections. With respect to the affect recognition tasks, the musical stimuli generated the greatest number of errors and the facial stimuli the fewest. The senile group performed significantly more poorly than the other two groups and the normal elderly made reliably more mistakes than the young adults to affective voice tones and melodies. Also, the normal elderly made more mistakes than the young people to nonemotional voice tones. The senile group responded at chance level to these stimuli. The number of errors to emotional and nonemotional voice tones did not differ within the young and normal elderly groups. However, the senile people responded with significantly greater accuracy to the affective voice inflections. It was concluded that aging is a factor that negatively affects the recognition of tonal inflections, be they vocal or musical. In addition, the recognition of emotional and nonemotional voice inflections are independent of one another.