Background

The ability to interpret emotional cues has been argued to play an important role in maintaining successful relationships and healthy psychological functioning . Real life examples show that the ability to decode emotional cues from faces and voices relates to relationship well-being and depression scores in a nonclinical way. Good ability to understand emotions also relate to an overall satisfaction in life. The majority of studies that have examined age effects on emotions have taken a sociocognitive perspective. Sociocognitive theories propose that with age there is an increased ability to understand and regulate emotions , because of increasing optimization of positive mood states and increased skill at understanding cues to emotional meaning. Older adults have had extensive life experience of analyzing emotional cues in interpersonal communication, and therefore it seems plausible that this skill might be preserved or improve with age.older adults are presumed to primarily focus on the lower half of faces (e.g., mouth region) when communicating with others, as shown in emotion recognition studies using eye-tracking methods . Therefore, they may fail to recognize emotions that are expressed mostly in upper parts of the face. This would explain why older adults are worse at recognizing anger and fear, emotions that are mainly expressed in the eye region, as compared to happiness that is arguably expressed by the use of smiles. A second possible reason for a decline in the ability to recognize negative emotions with age is the proposed positivity bias in older adults. More specifically, older adults tend to try maximizing emotional rewards in the context of social interaction and concentrate on positive social interaction, rather than negative interaction. Therefore, with aging, people tend to experience fewer negative emotions and are argued to be worse in recognizing and distinguishing negative emotions