We all know the cliché that ‘the eyes are the window to the soul’. A lot of psychology research has supported the idea that we look at people’s eyes when trying to decide what they are feeling: Is someone who seems unhappy sad, angry or scared? But other parts of the face are also important in giving us cues to feelings: Smiles tell us that people are happy. Our research indicates that younger (aged 18-40) and older people (aged 65+) differ in the way that they use information from the eyes and the mouth to decide what someone else is feeling.
We used experimental techniques to show people different parts of the face and looked at the information they used to decode emotions. When looking at an emotional face, older people look more at the mouth and less at the eyes than younger people do. While older people are worse than young at deciding which emotion is shown in the top half of a face including the eyes, older people are betterthan young at decoding some emotions from the bottom half of the face, including the mouth.
But why might this matter? Surely there won’t be any situation in which we can only see half of someone’s face? Infact, in 2020, because of Covid, we suddenly were in a situation where facemasks covered the lower half of faces, obscuring the nose and mouth. So, in our studies we tested whether facemasks made understanding others’ feelings particularly difficult for older people. Indeed, this was the case: It is more difficult for everyone to read another’s emotions when they are wearing a facemask, but older people in particular struggle to identify emotions from a face which is half covered by a facemask.
This is important because wearing facemasks continued for a long time in healthcare settings, and older people are most likely to use health services. One thing that might improve things is to use transparent facemasks. We found that older adults trying to decode another person’s emotions particularly benefited when the face was shown with a transparent as compared to a conventional facemask. So, in healthcare settings where facemasks continue to be used, transparent versions will help older people to understand the emotional signals shown in the face.
Understanding what someone else is feeling and picking up on the social signals sent from subtle smiles or frowns is really important in communication and building social relationships. Knowing that people of different ages use and interpret these cues differently is useful in supporting better communication. We still don’t understand why younger and older people differ in their use of emotional cues and this is an important topic for future research.
Professor Louise Phillips, School of Psychology.
Slessor, G., Insch, P., Donaldson, I., Sciaponaite, V. Adamowitz, M. & Phillips, L.H. (2022). Adult age differences in using information from the eyes and mouth to make decisions about others’ emotions. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B,77, 2241-2251.doi: 10.1093/geronb/gbac097
Read the full article here.
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