Emotional arousal deficit or emotional regulation bias? An electrophysiological study of age-related differences in emotion perception

ABSTRACTBackground/Study context: Adult age differences in emotion processing have been attributed to age-related decline in earlier emotional perception and age-related bias in later emotional regulation. Yet, the relationship between the processes of early emotion perception and bias in emotional regulation and their influence on behavioral outcomes remains unclear. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have the temporal precision to allow for the online measure of neurophysiological activity and provide potential insight into the complex dynamics of emotion processing and aging.Methods: ERPs were used as the primary measure to examine the hypotheses that younger adults will differ in emotional arousal and emotional bias as represented by the early P1 waveform and later P3 waveform, respectively. Thirty-two younger and older adults (16 each) performed a facial emotion discrimination task in which they identified standardized angry, happy, or neutral expressions of faces from the NimStim database.Results: Youn...