Auditory, visual, and auditory-visual spoken emotion recognition in young and old adults

The study examined the recognition of emotional speech as a function of the clarity of expression, the modality of presentation, and participants' age (Mage = 19.8 vs. 73.9). Based on the results of a previous study, expression clarity was varied by selecting Auditory-Visual (AV) recordings of one actor who had well recognised expressions of anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, and neutral and one actor who did not. The young (n = 24) and older (n = 19) participants were presented these stimuli in Auditory-Only (AO), Visual-Only (VO), or AV format and made a forced-choice judgement on each. Older adults performed worse than younger ones for all presentation modalities except clear VO expressions. Importantly, whereas younger adults showed an AV benefit (AV > VO), older adults did not (showing a presentation mode by clarity interaction). The importance of varying signal clarity when investigating age effects was discussed.