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      Compensating for age limits through emotional crossmodal integration

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          Abstract

          Social interactions in daily life necessitate the integration of social signals from different sensory modalities. In the aging literature, it is well established that the recognition of emotion in facial expressions declines with advancing age, and this also occurs with vocal expressions. By contrast, crossmodal integration processing in healthy aging individuals is less documented. Here, we investigated the age-related effects on emotion recognition when faces and voices were presented alone or simultaneously, allowing for crossmodal integration. In this study, 31 young adults ( M = 25.8 years) and 31 older adults ( M = 67.2 years) were instructed to identify several basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and a neutral expression, which were displayed as visual (facial expressions), auditory (non-verbal affective vocalizations) or crossmodal (simultaneous, congruent facial and vocal affective expressions) stimuli. The results showed that older adults performed slower and worse than younger adults at recognizing negative emotions from isolated faces and voices. In the crossmodal condition, although slower, older adults were as accurate as younger except for anger. Importantly, additional analyses using the “race model” demonstrate that older adults benefited to the same extent as younger adults from the combination of facial and vocal emotional stimuli. These results help explain some conflicting results in the literature and may clarify emotional abilities related to daily life that are partially spared among older adults.

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          Social and Emotional Aging

          The past several decades have witnessed unidimensional decline models of aging give way to life-span developmental models that consider how specific processes and strategies facilitate adaptive aging. In part, this shift was provoked by the stark contrast between findings that clearly demonstrate decreased biological, physiological, and cognitive capacity and those suggesting that people are generally satisfied in old age and experience relatively high levels of emotional well-being. In recent years, this supposed “paradox” of aging has been reconciled through careful theoretical analysis and empirical investigation. Viewing aging as adaptation sheds light on resilience, well-being, and emotional distress across adulthood.
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            Amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex are inversely coupled during regulation of negative affect and predict the diurnal pattern of cortisol secretion among older adults.

            Among younger adults, the ability to willfully regulate negative affect, enabling effective responses to stressful experiences, engages regions of prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala. Because regions of PFC and the amygdala are known to influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, here we test whether PFC and amygdala responses during emotion regulation predict the diurnal pattern of salivary cortisol secretion. We also test whether PFC and amygdala regions are engaged during emotion regulation in older (62- to 64-year-old) rather than younger individuals. We measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging as participants regulated (increased or decreased) their affective responses or attended to negative picture stimuli. We also collected saliva samples for 1 week at home for cortisol assay. Consistent with previous work in younger samples, increasing negative affect resulted in ventral lateral, dorsolateral, and dorsomedial regions of PFC and amygdala activation. In contrast to previous work, decreasing negative affect did not produce the predicted robust pattern of higher PFC and lower amygdala activation. Individuals demonstrating the predicted effect (decrease < attend in the amygdala), however, exhibited higher signal in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) for the same contrast. Furthermore, participants displaying higher VMPFC and lower amygdala signal when decreasing compared with the attention control condition evidenced steeper, more normative declines in cortisol over the course of the day. Individual differences yielded the predicted link between brain function while reducing negative affect in the laboratory and diurnal regulation of endocrine activity in the home environment.
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              The social brain in psychiatric and neurological disorders.

              Psychiatric and neurological disorders have historically provided key insights into the structure-function relationships that subserve human social cognition and behavior, informing the concept of the 'social brain'. In this review, we take stock of the current status of this concept, retaining a focus on disorders that impact social behavior. We discuss how the social brain, social cognition, and social behavior are interdependent, and emphasize the important role of development and compensation. We suggest that the social brain, and its dysfunction and recovery, must be understood not in terms of specific structures, but rather in terms of their interaction in large-scale networks. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                27 May 2015
                2015
                : 6
                : 691
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Institut de Psychologie, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Université Paris Descartes , Boulogne-Billancourt, France
                [2] 2Groupe Intégration Multimodale, Interaction et Signal Social, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, CNRS UMR 7222 , Paris, France
                [3] 3Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint Denis , Saint-Denis, France
                Author notes

                Edited by: Andrea Hildebrandt, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität Greifswald, Germany

                Reviewed by: Natalie Ebner, University of Florida, USA; Cesar F. Lima, University College London, UK

                *Correspondence: Laurence Chaby, Groupe Intégration Multimodale, Interaction et Signal Social, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, CNRS UMR 7222, 4 Place Jussieu, Paris 75005, France, laurence.chaby@ 123456parisdescartes.fr

                This article was submitted to Perception Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00691
                4445247
                26074845
                6f2fc0fe-0aed-432c-bfe7-ecab70b1d98a
                Copyright © 2015 Chaby, Luherne-du Boullay, Chetouani and Plaza.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 01 April 2015
                : 10 May 2015
                Page count
                Figures: 3, Tables: 2, Equations: 15, References: 135, Pages: 12, Words: 10877
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                aging,emotion,faces,voices,non-verbal vocalizations,multimodal integration,race model

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