Channel dominance shifts in emotion perception (Lin et al., 2024)
Creators: name: Lin, Yi
name: Ye, Xiaoqing
name: Zhang, Huaiyi
name: Xu, Fei
name: Zhang, Jingyu
name: Ding, Hongwei
name: Zhang, Yang
Publisher: name: ASHA journals
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 520403
subject: Learning, motivation and emotion
classificationCode: 520406
subject: Sensory processes, perception and performance
classificationCode: 520405
subject: Psycholinguistics (incl. speech production and comprehension)

description: <b>Purpose: </b>Prior research extensively documented challenges in recognizing verbal and nonverbal emotion among older individuals when compared with younger counterparts. However, the nature of these age-related changes remains unclear. The present study investigated how older and younger adults comprehend four basic emotions (i.e., anger, happiness, neutrality, and sadness) conveyed through verbal (semantic) and nonverbal (facial and prosodic) channels.<b>Method: </b>A total of 73 older adults (43 women, <i>M</i><sub>age</sub> = 70.18 years) and 74 younger adults (37 women, <i>M</i><sub>age</sub> = 22.01 years) partook in a fixed-choice test for recognizing emotions presented visually via facial expressions or auditorily through prosody or semantics.<b>Results: </b>The results confirmed age-related decline in recognizing emotions across all channels except for identifying happy facial expressions. Furthermore, the two age groups demonstrated both commonalities and disparities in their inclinations toward specific channels. While both groups displayed a shared dominance of visual facial cues over auditory emotional signals, older adults indicated a preference for semantics, whereas younger adults displayed a preference for prosody in auditory emotion perception. Notably, the dominance effects observed in older adults for visual and semantic cues were less pronounced for sadness and anger compared to other emotions. These challenges in emotion recognition and the shifts in channel preferences among older adults were correlated with their general cognitive capabilities.<b>Conclusion: </b>Together, the findings underscore that age-related obstacles in perceiving emotions and alterations in channel dominance, which vary by emotional category, are significantly intertwined with overall cognitive functioning.<b>Supplemental Material S1.</b> Emotion categorization patterns by older and younger adults.<b>Supplemental Material S2.</b> Pairwise contrasts for significant main effects and interactions in accuracy.<b>Supplemental Material S3.</b> Pairwise contrasts for significant main effects and interactions in reaction time.<b>Supplemental Material S4.</b> Pairwise contrasts of group differences for significant Emotion × Group and Channel × Emotion × Group interactions in accuracy.<b>Supplemental Material S5.</b> Pairwise contrasts of group differences for significant Channel × Emotion × Group interactions in reaction time.<b>Supplemental Material S6.</b> Channel dominance patterns of older adults with higher and lower cognitive functioning in (a) accuracy and (b) reaction time measures.Lin, Y., Ye, X., Zhang, H., Xu, F., Zhang, J., Ding, H., &amp; Zhang, Y. (2024). Category-sensitive age-related shifts between prosodic and semantic dominance in emotion perception linked to cognitive capacities. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67</i>(12), 4829–4849. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00817