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      Superior Recognition Performance for Happy Masked and Unmasked Faces in Both Younger and Older Adults

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          Abstract

          In the aging literature it has been shown that even though emotion recognition performance decreases with age, the decrease is less for happiness than other facial expressions. Studies in younger adults have also revealed that happy faces are more strongly attended to and better recognized than other emotional facial expressions. Thus, there might be a more age independent happy face advantage in facial expression recognition. By using a backward masking paradigm and varying stimulus onset asynchronies (17–267 ms) the temporal development of a happy face advantage, on a continuum from low to high levels of visibility, was examined in younger and older adults. Results showed that across age groups, recognition performance for happy faces was better than for neutral and fearful faces at durations longer than 50 ms. Importantly, the results showed a happy face advantage already during early processing of emotional faces in both younger and older adults. This advantage is discussed in terms of processing of salient perceptual features and elaborative processing of the happy face. We also investigate the combined effect of age and neuroticism on emotional face processing. The rationale was previous findings of age-related differences in physiological arousal to emotional pictures and a relation between arousal and neuroticism. Across all durations, there was an interaction between age and neuroticism, showing that being high in neuroticism might be disadvantageous for younger, but not older adults’ emotion recognition performance during arousal enhancing tasks. These results indicate that there is a relation between aging, neuroticism, and performance, potentially related to physiological arousal.

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          Most cited references28

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          Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory.

          As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions. Strategic processes in older adults' emotional attention and memory might play a role in this variation with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition, when shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults' subsequent memories than those of younger adults. This positivity effect in older adults' memories seems to be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms that enhance positive and diminish negative information. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to older adults' improved emotion regulation.
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            Neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals.

            Many emotional stimuli are processed without being consciously perceived. Recent evidence indicates that subcortical structures have a substantial role in this processing. These structures are part of a phylogenetically ancient pathway that has specific functional properties and that interacts with cortical processes. There is now increasing evidence that non-consciously perceived emotional stimuli induce distinct neurophysiological changes and influence behaviour towards the consciously perceived world. Understanding the neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals will clarify the phylogenetic continuity of emotion systems across species and the integration of cortical and subcortical activity in the human brain.
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              Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge.

              Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain was used to study whether the amygdala is activated in response to emotional stimuli, even in the absence of explicit knowledge that such stimuli were presented. Pictures of human faces bearing fearful or happy expressions were presented to 10 normal, healthy subjects by using a backward masking procedure that resulted in 8 of 10 subjects reporting that they had not seen these facial expressions. The backward masking procedure consisted of 33 msec presentations of fearful or happy facial expressions, their offset coincident with the onset of 167 msec presentations of neutral facial expressions. Although subjects reported seeing only neutral faces, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal in the amygdala was significantly higher during viewing of masked fearful faces than during the viewing of masked happy faces. This difference was composed of significant signal increases in the amygdala to masked fearful faces as well as significant signal decreases to masked happy faces, consistent with the notion that the level of amygdala activation is affected differentially by the emotional valence of external stimuli. In addition, these facial expressions activated the sublenticular substantia innominata (SI), where signal increases were observed to both fearful and happy faces--suggesting a spatial dissociation of territories that respond to emotional valence versus salience or arousal value. This study, using fMRI in conjunction with masked stimulus presentations, represents an initial step toward determining the role of the amygdala in nonconscious processing.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychology
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                30 November 2012
                2012
                : 3
                : 520
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institute Stockholm, Sweden
                [2] 2Department of Psychology, Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden
                Author notes

                Edited by: Pascal Belin, University of Glasgow, UK

                Reviewed by: Iiro P. Jääskeläinen, University of Helsinki, Finland; Marianne Latinus, University of Glasgow, UK

                *Correspondence: Joakim Svärd, Aging Research Center, Gävlegatan 16, Stockholm 113 30, Sweden. e-mail: joakim.svard@ 123456ki.se

                This article was submitted to Frontiers in Emotion Science, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00520
                3510469
                23226135
                fb61d381-1730-47ce-a384-7fea8e537421
                Copyright © 2012 Svärd, Wiens and Fischer.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.

                History
                : 06 August 2012
                : 03 November 2012
                Page count
                Figures: 4, Tables: 2, Equations: 0, References: 41, Pages: 11, Words: 8736
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                fearful,faces,emotion,neuroticism,positivity bias,masking,aging,happy
                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                fearful, faces, emotion, neuroticism, positivity bias, masking, aging, happy

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