Age Bias in Emotion Detection: An Analysis of Facial Emotion Recognition Performance on Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Adults

The growing potential for facial emotion recognition (FER) technology has encouraged expedited development at the cost of rigorous validation. Many of its use-cases may also impact the diverse global community as FER becomes embedded into domains ranging from education to security to healthcare. Yet, prior work has highlighted that FER can exhibit both gender and racial biases like other facial analysis techniques. As a result, bias-mitigation research efforts have mainly focused on tackling gender and racial disparities, while other demographic related biases, such as age, have seen less progress. This work seeks to examine the performance of state of the art commercial FER technology on expressive images of men and women from three distinct age groups. We utilize four different commercial FER systems in a black box methodology to evaluate how six emotions - anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, and sadness - are correctly detected by age group. We further investigate how algorithmic changes over the last year have affected system performance. Our results found that all four commercial FER systems most accurately perceived emotion in images of young adults and least accurately in images of older adults. This trend was observed for analyses conducted in 2019 and 2020. However, little to no gender disparities were observed in either year. While older adults may not have been the initial target consumer of FER technology, statistics show the demographic is quickly growing more keen to applications that use such systems. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering various demographic subgroups during FER system validation and the need for inclusive, intersectional algorithmic developmental practices.