Louise H. Phillips

A meta-analytic review of emotion recognition and aging: Implications for neuropsychological models of aging

This meta-analysis of 28 data sets (N=705 older adults, N=962 younger adults) examined age differences in emotion recognition across four modalities: faces, voices, bodies/contexts, and matching of faces to voices. The results indicate that older adults have increased difficulty recognising at least some of the basic emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness) in each modality, with some emotions (anger and sadness) and some modalities (face-voice matching) creating particular difficulties. The predominant pattern across all emotions and modalities was of age-related decline with the exception that there was a trend for older adults to be better than young adults at recognising disgusted facial expressions. These age-related changes are examined in the context of three theoretical perspectives-positivity effects, general cognitive decline, and more specific neuropsychological change in the social brain. We argue that the pattern of age-related change observed is most consistent with a neuropsychological model of adult aging stemming from changes in frontal and temporal volume, and/or changes in neurotransmitters.

A Meta-Analytic Review of Prospective Memory and Aging.

A meta-analysis of prospective memory (PM) studies revealed that in laboratory settings younger participants outperform older participants on tests of both time- and event-based PM (rs=-.39 and -.34, respectively). Event-based PM tasks that impose higher levels of controlled strategic demand are associated with significantly larger age effects than event-based PM tasks that are supported by relatively more automatic processes (rs=-.40 vs. -.14, respectively). However, contrary to the prevailing view in the literature, retrospective memory as measured by free recall is associated with significantly greater age-related decline (r=-.52) than PM, and older participants perform substantially better than their younger counterparts in naturalistic PM studies (rs=.35 and.52 for event- and time-based PM, respectively).

Age, Executive Function, and Social Decision Making: A Dorsolateral Prefrontal Theory of Cognitive Aging

Current neuropsychological models propose that some age-related cognitive changes are due to frontal-lobe deterioration. However, these models have not considered the possible subdivision of the frontal lobes into the dorsolateral and ventromedial regions. This study assessed the age effects on 3 tasks of executive function and working memory, tasks dependent on dorsolateral prefrontal dysfunction; and 3 tasks of emotion and social decision making, tasks dependent on ventromedial prefrontal dysfunction. Age-related differences in performance were found on all tasks dependent on dorsolateral prefrontal dysfunction. In contrast, age-related differences were not found on the majority of the tasks dependent on ventromedial prefrontal dysfunction. The results support a specific dorsolateral prefrontal theory of cognitive changes with age, rather than a global decline in frontal-lobe function.

Verbal fluency performance in dementia of the Alzheimer’s type: A meta-analysis

A meta-analysis of 153 studies with 15,990 participants was conducted to compare the magnitude of deficits upon tests of phonemic and semantic fluency for patients with dementia of the Alzheimers type (DAT) relative to healthy controls. As has been found for patients with focal temporal cortical lesions (but not for patients with focal frontal cortical lesions), DAT patients were significantly more impaired on tests of semantic relative to phonemic fluency (r=0.73 and 0.57, respectively). Thus, since phonemic and semantic fluency are considered to impose comparable demands upon executive control processes such as effortful retrieval, but the latter is relatively more dependent upon the integrity of semantic memory, these results suggest that the semantic memory deficit in DAT reflects a degradation of the semantic store. Also supporting this conclusion, confrontation naming, a measure of semantic memory that imposes only minimal demands upon effortful retrieval, was significantly more impaired than phonemic fluency (r=0.60 versus 0.55, respectively). However, since semantic fluency was also significantly more impaired than confrontation naming (r=0.73 versus 0.61), deficits in semantic memory and effortful retrieval may be additive. Semantic, but not phonemic fluency, was significantly more impaired than measures of verbal intelligence and psychomotor speed. Thus, the semantic memory deficit in DAT qualifies as a differential deficit, but executive dysfunction as indexed by phonemic fluency does not constitute an additional isolated feature of the disorder. Dementia severity was not significantly related to the relative magnitude of deficits upon phonemic and semantic fluency.

Shifting moods, wandering minds: negative moods lead the mind to wander.

This study examined the effect of mood states on mind wandering. Positive, neutral, and negative moods were induced in participants prior to them completing a sustained attention task. Mind wandering was measured by using the frequencies of both behavioral lapses and retrospective indices of subjective experience. Relative to a positive mood, induction of a negative mood led participants to make more lapses, report a greater frequency of task irrelevant thoughts, and become less inclined to reengage attentional resources following a lapse. Positive mood, by contrast, was associated with a better ability to adjust performance after a lapse. These results provide further support for the notion that a negative mood reduces the amount of attentional commitment to the task in hand and may do so by enhancing the focus on task irrelevant personal concerns.

Positive Mood and Executive Function: Evidence From Stroop and Fluency Tasks

Contrasting predictions have been made about the effects of positive mood states on the performance of frontal lobe tests that tap executive functions such as inhibition, switching, and strategy use. It has been argued that positive mood is likely to improve some cognitive processes, particularly those dependent on the frontal cortex and anterior cingulate of the brain. However, there is some evidence that happy mood may impair executive functioning. The current experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on Stoop and fluency tests, which are frequently used to assess executive function. Positive mood impaired performance on a switching condition of the Stroop test, but improved performance on a creative uses test of fluency. The effect of positive mood on an executive task may therefore depend on whether a task is inherently motivating or is impaired by diffuse semantic activation.

Adult age differences in event-based prospective memory: A meta-analysis on the role of focal versus nonfocal cues

Studies of age differences in event-based prospective memory indicate wide variation in the magnitude of age effects. One explanation derived from the multiprocess framework proposes that age differences depend on whether the cue to carry out a prospective intention is focal to ongoing task processing. A meta-analysis of 117 effect sizes from 4,709 participants provided evidence for this view, as age effects were greater when the prospective cue to the ongoing task was nonfocal compared with when it was focal. However, the results only support a weaker but not a stronger prediction of the multiprocess framework, as age impairments were reliably above zero for both types of retrieval cues.

Age, anger regulation and well-being

Emotion regulation has been argued to be an important factor in well-being. The current study investigated the effects of adult aging on emotional expression, emotional control and rumination about emotional events, focusing on an emotion which is particularly important in social interaction: anger. Measures of anger regulation and well-being were obtained in a sample of 286 adults aged between 18 and 88. Older adults expressed anger outwardly less often, and reported more inner control of anger using calming strategies compared to their younger counterparts. These age differences were not explained by variance in social desirability of responding. Age improvements in negative affect and anxiety were partly explained by age differences in anger regulation suggesting an important role for anger management in good mental health amongst older adults. Further, age improvements in quality of life were explained by variance in anger regulation indicating that improved management of emotions with age is an important factor in maintaining well-being in old age.

Differential Effects of Aging on Executive and Automatic Inhibition

One of the major accounts of cognitive aging states that age effects are related to a deficiency of inhibitory mechanisms (Hasher & Zacks, 1988). Given that inhibition has traditionally been associated with the frontal cortex, and that the frontal cortex deteriorates early with age (Raz, 2000), this is consistent with the frontal hypothesis of aging (West, 1996). However, not all inhibitory processes require executive control, and so they are not all equally supported by the frontal cortex. As a consequence, one would expect dissociations between inhibitory tasks in the sense of a greater susceptibility of executive/frontal inhibition to aging. Based on Niggs (2000) working inhibition taxonomy, we tested this hypothesis by combining inhibitory paradigms with different levels of executive control within the same participants. The results showed that age affects Stroop interference but not negative priming (Experiment 1) and stop signal responsiveness but not negative priming (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that tasks with a high executive (or effortful) inhibitory control are more sensitive to aging than tasks with a lower executive (more automatic) inhibitory control. The results are discussed in relation to the inhibitory and frontal accounts of aging.

A meta-analytic review of age differences in theory of mind.

Age-related difficulties in understanding basic emotional signals are now well established, but less clear is how aging affects theory of mind (ToM), which refers to the understanding of more complex emotions and mental states. A meta-analysis of 23 datasets involving 1462 (790 younger and 672 older) participants was conducted in which six basic types of ToM task were identified (Stories, Eyes, Videos, False belief-video, False belief-other, and Faux pas). Each ToM task was also categorized according to domain (affective, cognitive, or mixed) and modality (verbal, visual-static, visual-dynamic, verbal and visual-static, or verbal and visual-dynamic). Overall, collapsed across all types of task, older adults were found to perform more poorly than younger adults, with the degree of ToM difficulty they experienced moderate in magnitude (r = -.41). The results also provide evidence for increased ToM difficulties in late adulthood regardless of specific task parameters, with deficits evident across all task types, domains, and modalities. With few exceptions, age deficits for ToM tasks were larger in magnitude compared with matched control tasks. These data have implications for our understanding of mental state attribution processes in late adulthood, suggesting that ToM difficulties are not simply secondary to non-ToM related task demands.