Work

The specificity of age-related decline in interpretation of emotion cues from prosody.

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: Older adults are not as good as younger adults at decoding prosodic emotions. We sought to determine the specificity of this finding. Performance of older and younger adults was compared on a prosodic emotion task, a "pure" prosodic emotion task, a linguistic prosody task, and a "pure" linguistic prosody task. Older adults were less accurate at interpreting prosodic emotion cues and nonemotional contours, concurrent semantic processing worsened interpretation, and performance was further degraded when identifying negative emotions and questions. Older adults display a pervasive problem interpreting prosodic cues, but further study is required to clarify the stage at which performance declines.

Source: Psychology and Aging

DOI: 10.1037/a0021861

Authors: Rachel L. C. Mitchell, Rachel A. Kingston, Sofia L. Barbosa Bouças

Institution: Durham University

Language: English

Topic: Aging and Gerontology Research

Subfield: Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: British Academy

Award: G1579733415