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What Causes Age-Related Emotion Recognition Decline?

Ted Ruffman*

Older adults ≥( 60 years) are worse than young adult<s 3( 0 years) recognizing facial, bodily, auditory and musi cal emotion expressions. I ask what causes these difficulties and run through five theories: (1) a positivity bias, (2) general cognitive decline, (3) a failure to look at the eyes, (4) stimuli with low ecological validity, and (5) brain change. I argue that brain change is the most likely cause, although currently there have still been only a few studies to examine this idea, and further, it is not clear what pattern of brain activation might be examined to differentiate young and older adults.