Every time we’re at crossroads in life and feel like we’ve gone adrift, we always go to an elder for advice, not only because they’ve seen more rainy seasons, but somehow they’re calm, positive attitude is pleasing. But have you ever stopped and wondered how older people are calmer, positive as opposed to an angsty, sensitive teenager? A research study has found that sensitivity to anger cues improves dramatically during early to mid-adolescence and decreases as people age.
For the purpose of the study, the research team created a digital test of emotional sensitivity which completed by nearly 10,000 participants, who were both men and women, ranging in the age of 10 to 85. The test enabled researchers to measure how much each person was able to detect subtle differences in facial cues of fear, anger, and happiness.
The test results additionally also identified how participants of different age groups showed changes in their sensitivity to those facial emotions. Findings of the study were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Rutter, the study’s lead author, explained that participants were tested using the web-based platform
“From studies and anecdotal evidence, we know that the everyday experiences of an adolescent are different from a middle-aged or older person, but we wanted to understand how these experiences might be linked with differences in basic emotion understanding,” said Germine.
“We found that sensitivity to anger cues improves dramatically during early to mid-adolescence,” said Rutter. On the other end of the life span, the study showed that sensitivity to facial cues for fear and anger decrease as people age, but the ability to detect happiness cues stays the same.
“It’s well established that there is an age-related decline in the ability to decode emotion cues, in general, but here we see very little decline in the ability to detect differences in happiness,” Germine said.
