• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.51-60
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• 2024

Previous research reported a decline in facial emotion recognition with aging, but whether this was due to a genuine decline in recognition ability or own-age face recognition bias remains unclear, as most studies used stimuli from younger models. Thus, this study recruited older adults as participants and utilized stimuli identical to Kim (2021) study for direct comparison. Participants rated the similarity of pairs of facial expressions representing six emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, and sadness) from three age groups (young, middle-aged, and old). Multidimensional scaling analysis revealed that, regardless of age, all three core dimensions were confirmed, indicating similar representation of facial emotions across age groups. The older participants assigned lower arousal and dominance to younger faces expressing disgust and higher arousal and dominance to younger faces expressing fear, indicating that they rated younger faces' disgust expressions less strongly and overestimated fear expressions. These findings suggest that the own-age face recognition bias in facial expression perception may be emotion-specific rather than universally applicable to all emotions.