Abstract
Background
Understanding changes in emotion processing in mental health conditions, in aging, and at the nexus of both, is important for contributing to knowledge about our expanding aging population. Effective processing of emotions is an important contributor to wellbeing. Consequently, disruptions and changes to such likely lead to reduced wellbeing and may contribute to the development and maintenance of significant mental health conditions. While some research has been conducted in emotion processing in older adults and aging, the evidence base for this in mental health conditions is limited.
Objectives
• To examine changes in emotion processing with aging in healthy adults over 45 years.
• To examine changes in emotion processing with aging in individuals 16-64 years old with mood disorders and healthy participants.
• To highlight areas and directions for future explorations of emotion processing in aging and mental health.
Methods
A cross-sectional study of emotion processing and non-emotional cognition in four age bands of healthy participants (between 45 and 84 years) was conducted. Differences in emotion processing were examined across the four age bands, as was the impact of non-emotional cognitive function on emotion processing. A second study involved an exploratory pooled analysis of facial emotion recognition in adults between 16 and 64 years with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, or healthy control participants. The impact of age and non-emotional cognition on emotion processing was investigated, alongside the influence of mood disorder diagnosis.
Results
In the analysis of the healthy older sample, a decrease in accuracy of facial emotion recognition was found with increasing age for the emotions of fear and sadness. No age-related changes were found for other emotions. An increase in reaction time with increasing age was present across all emotions and the performance index showed a reduction in efficiency with age for all emotions. Further analysis exploring misidentification bias showed that participants were less likely to misidentify neutral faces as sadness, anger, or fear as age increased. Significant correlations were also found in the healthy sample consistently between fear/sadness/anger and age, when controlled for non-emotional cognition.
In the mood disorder sample, no effect of diagnosis or current depression was found. Reduced accuracy with aging was found for processing of anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise alongside an increase in recognition accuracy for happiness with increasing age. An increase in reaction time with age was found across all emotions except happiness, and the performance index showed a reduction in efficiency with age for all emotions except happiness.
Conclusion
Positivity bias was demonstrated with increasing age, across an age range of 16-84 years, in healthy participants and participants with mood disorders. The positivity bias was seen here by late middle age. The positivity bias shown here in people with mood disorders is surprising given that findings in mood disorder samples have generally shown a negativity bias compared with healthy controls. A clear future direction would be to examine the relationship between mood disorder, age, and emotion processing across the age range.