Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×

Online ordering will be unavailable from 17:00 GMT on Friday, April 25 until 17:00 GMT on Sunday, April 27 due to maintenance. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Hostname: page-component-669899f699-chc8l Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-27T05:18:38.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - A lifespan developmental perspective on interpersonal accuracy

from Part II - Correlates of interpersonal accuracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2016

By
Derek M. Isaacowitz ,
Ishabel M. Vicaria  and
Matthew W. E. Murry
Edited by
Judith A. Hall ,
Marianne Schmid Mast  and
Tessa V. West
Judith A. Hall
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
Marianne Schmid Mast
Affiliation:
Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
Tessa V. West
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access

Summary

Abstract

In this chapter, we consider evidence for changes in emotion perception accuracy and social perception accuracy across the lifespan. Perhaps not surprisingly, the focus in the child development literature is on how and when accuracy improves with age, whereas the focus in adult development and aging is on how these processes may decline at older ages. Descriptive work on these questions is more advanced than research on specific mechanisms, and there has been some attention to individual differences as well. Despite discontinuities between the two literatures in methods and constructs, evidence to date suggests emotion perception increases in childhood and declines into old age, but social perception may not show aging-related declines to the same degree.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Social Psychology of Perceiving Others Accurately , pp. 206 - 229
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Antonakis, J., & Dalgas, O. (2009). Predicting elections: Child’s play! Science, 323, 1183.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baird, J., & Astington, J. (2005). The development of the intention concept: From the observable world to the unobservable mind. In Hassin, R., Uleman, J., & Bargh, J. (Eds.), The new unconscious (pp. 256–276). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bakeman, R., & Adamson, L. B. (1984). Coordinating attention to people and objects in mother infant and peer-infant interaction. Child Development, 55, 1278–1289.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Banks, M. S., & Ginsburg, A. P. (1985). Infant visual preferences: A review and new theoretical treatment. In Reese, H. W. (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (pp. 207–246). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barrera, M. E., & Maurer, D. (1981). The perception of facial expressions by three-month-olds. Child Development, 5, 203–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baum, K., & Nowicki, S. Jr. (1998). Perception of emotion: Measuring decoding accuracy of adult prosodic cues varying in intensity. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 22, 89–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bretherton, L., & Beeghly, M. (1982). Talking about internal states: The acquisition of an explicit theory of mind. Developmental Psychology, 19, 906–921.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blair, R. J., Morris, J. S., Frith, C. D., Perrett, D. I., & Dolan, R. J. (1999). Dissociable neural responses to facial expressions of sadness and anger. Brain, 122, 883–893.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Blanke, E. S., Rauers, A., & Riediger, M. (2014). Nice to meet you: Adult age differences in empathic accuracy for strangers. Psychology and Aging, 30, 149–159.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brim, O. G., Ryff, C. D., & Kessler, R. C. (Eds.) (2004). How healthy are we?: A national study of well-being at midlife. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brosgole, L., & Weisman, J. (1995). Mood recognition across the ages. International Journal of Neuroscience, 82, 169–189.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Burgmans, S., van Boxtel, M. P. J., Vuurman, F. P. M., Smeets, F., Gronenschild, E. H. B. M., Uylings, H. B. M., & Jolles, J. (2009). The prevalence of cortical gray matter atrophy may be overestimated in the healthy aging brain. Neuropsychology, 23, 541–550.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Calder, A. J., Keane, J., Manly, T., Sprengelmeyer, R., Scott, S., Nimmo-Smith, I., & Young, A. W. (2003). Facial expression recognition across the adult life span. Neuropsychologia, 41, 195–202.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Charles, S. T., Mather, M., & Carstensen, L. L. (2003). Aging and emotional memory: The forgettable nature of negative images for older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132, 310–324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cogsdill, E. J., Todorov, A. T., Spelke, E. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2014). Inferring character from faces: A developmental study. Psychological Science, 25, 1132–1139.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Collins, M. (1996). Personality and achievement correlates of nonverbal processing ability in African American children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, Emory University.Google Scholar
Demertizis, A., & Nowicki, S. Jr. (1997, April). Perception of emotion: Measuring decoding accuracy of child prosodic cues varying in emotion intensity. Paper presented at meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, Mobile, AL.Google Scholar
Ebling, R., & Levenson, R. W. (2003). Who are the marital experts? Journal of Marriage and Family, 65, 130–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Field, T. M., Cohen, D., Garcia, R., & Greenberg, R. (1984). Mother-stranger face discrimination by the newborn. Infant Behavior and Development, 7, 19–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Field, T. M., Woodson, R. W., Greenberg, R., & Cohen, C. (1982). Discrimination and imitation of facial expressions by neonates. Science, 218, 179–181.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frank, M. C., Vul, E., & Johnson, S. P. (2009). Development of infants’ attention to faces during the first year. Cognition, 110, 160–170.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Freund, A. M., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2014). Aging and social perception: So far, more similarities than differences. Psychology and Aging, 29, 451–453.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Halberstadt, A. G., Crisp, V. W., & Eaton, K. L. (1999). Family expressiveness: A retrospective and new directions for research. In Philippot, P., Feldman, R. S., & Coats, E. J. (Eds.), The social context of nonverbal behavior (pp. 109–155). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Halberstadt, A. G., & Eaton, K. L. (2002). A meta-analysis of family expressiveness and children’s emotion expressiveness and understanding. Marriage and Family Review, 34, 35–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halberstadt, J., Ruffman, T., Murray, J., Taumoepeau, M., & Ryan, M. (2011). Emotion perception explains age-related differences in the perception of social gaffes. Psychology and Aging, 26, 133–136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henry, J. D., Phillips, L. H., Ruffman, T., & Bailey, P. E. (2013). A meta-analytic review of age differences in theory of mind. Psychology and Aging, 28, 826–839.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Herrenkohl, R., Herrenkohl, E., Egolf, B., & Wu, P. (1991). The developmental consequences of child abuse. In Starr, R. & Wolfe, D. (Eds.), The effects of child abuse and neglect (pp. 57–81). New York: Guilford.Press.Google Scholar
Hess, T. M., Leclerc, C. M., Swaim, E., & Weatherbee, S. R. (2009). Aging and everyday judgments: The impact of motivational and processing resource factors. Psychology and Aging, 24, 735–740.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Iidaka, T., Okada, T., Murata, T., Omori, M., Kosaka, H., Sadato, N., & Yonekura, Y. (2002). Age‐related differences in the medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces as revealed by fMRI. Hippocampus, 12, 352–362.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Isaacowitz, D. M., & Stanley, J. T. (2011). Bringing an ecological perspective to the study of aging and recognition of emotional facial expressions: Past, current, and future methods. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 35, 261–278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keating, C. F., & Bai, D. L. (1986). Children’s attributions of social dominance from facial cues. Child Development, 57, 1269–1276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelly, D. J., Quinn, P. C., Slater, A. M., Lee, K., Gibson, A., Smith, M., … & Pascalis, O. (2005). Three‐month‐olds, but not newborns, prefer own‐race faces. Developmental Science, 8, F31–F36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krendl, A. C., & Ambady, N. (2010). Older adults’ decoding of emotions: Role of dynamic versus static cues and age-related cognitive decline. Psychology and Aging, 25, 788–793.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krendl, A. C., Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2014). Does aging impair first impression accuracy? Differentiating emotion recognition from complex social inferences. Psychology and Aging, 29, 482–490.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
LaBarbera, V. D., Izard, C. E., Vietze, P., & Parisi, S. A. (1976). Four- and six-month-old infants’ visual responses to joy, anger, and neutral expressions. Child Development, 47, 535–538.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ludemann, P. M. (1991). Generalized discrimination of positive facial expressions by seven- and ten-month-old infants. Child Development, 62, 55–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ludemann, P. M., & Nelson, C. A. (1988). The categorical representation of facial expressions by 7-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 24, 492–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacPherson, S. E., Phillips, L. H., & Della Sala, S. (2002). Age, executive function and social decision making: A dorsolateral prefrontal theory of cognitive aging. Psychology and Aging, 17, 598–609.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McClanahan, P. (1996). Social competence correlates of children who are 7 and 8 years of age. Unpublished masters thesis, Department of Psychology, Emory University.Google Scholar
McDowell, C. L., Harrison, D. W., & Demaree, H. A. (1994). Is right hemisphere decline in the perception of emotion a function of aging? International Journal of Neuroscience, 79, 1–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mondloch, C. J., Robbins, R., & Maurer, D. (2010). Discrimination of facial features by adults, 10-year-olds and cataract-reversal patients. Perception, 39, 184–194.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Montepare, J. M., & Zebrowitz-McArthur, L. (1989). Children’s perceptions of babyfaced adults. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 69, 467–472.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Murphy, N. A., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2010). Age effects and gaze patterns in recognising emotional expressions: An in-depth look at gaze measures and covariates. Cognition and Emotion, 24, 436–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, C. A., & Dolgin, K. (1985). The generalized discrimination of facial expressions by 7-month-old infants. Child Development, 56, 58–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, C. A., Morse, P. A., & Leavitt, L. A. (1979). Recognition of facial expressions by 7-month-old infants. Child Development, 50, 1239–1242.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nowicki, S. Jr., & Carton, E. (1997). The relation of nonverbal processing ability of faces and voices and children’s feelings of depression and competence. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 158, 357–364.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nowicki, S. Jr., & Duke, M. (2001). Nonverbal receptivity: The diagnostic analysis of nonverbal accuracy (DANVA). In Hall, J. A. & Bernieri, F. J. (Eds.), Interpersonal sensitivity: Theory and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Orgeta, V., & Phillips, L. H. (2008). Effects of age and emotional intensity on the recognition of facial emotion. Experimental Aging Research, 34, 63–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pollak, S. D., & Sinha, P. (2002). Effects of early experience on children’s recognition of facial displays of emotion. Developmental Psychology, 38, 784–791.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rholes, W. S., & Ruble, D. N. (1984). Children’s understanding of dispositional characteristics of others. Child Development, 55, 550–560.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richter, D., & Kunzmann, U. (2011). Age differences in three facets of empathy: Performance based evidence. Psychology and Aging, 26, 60–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roberts, V. J., Nowicki, S. Jr., & McClure, E. (1998, February). Emotional prosody recognition and right hemisphere functioning in the elderly. Paper presented at the 26th Annual Meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society, Honolulu, HI.Google Scholar
Ruffman, T. (2011). Ecological validity and age-related change in emotion recognition. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 35, 297–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruffman, T., Henry, J. D., Livingstone, V., & Phillips, L. H. (2008). A meta-analytic review of emotion recognition and aging: Implications for neuropsychological models of aging. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 32, 863–881.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ruffman, T., Sullivan, S., & Edge, N. (2006). Differences in the way older and younger adults rate threat in faces but not situations. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 61, 187–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ruffman, T., Sullivan, S., & Dittrich, W. (2009). Older adults’ recognition of bodily and auditory expressions of emotion. Psychology and Aging, 24, 614–622.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Salthouse, T. A. (1996). The processing-speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review, 103, 403–428.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwartz, G. M., Izard, C. E., & Ansul, S. E. (1985). The 5-month-old’s ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotion. Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 65–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Secord, P., & Peevers, B. (1974). The development and attribution of person concepts. In Mischel, T. (Ed.), Understanding other persons (pp. 117–142). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Serrano, J. M., Iglesias, J., & Leoches, A. (1992). Visual discrimination and recognition of facial expressions of anger, fear, and surprise in four- and six-month-old infants. Developmental Psychobiology, 25, 411–425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slater, A., & Quinn, P. C. (2001). Face recognition in the newborn infant. Infant and Child Development, 10, 21–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slater, A., Von der Schulenburg, C., Brown, E., Badenoch, M., Butterworth, G., Parsons, S., & Samuels, C. (1998). Newborn infants prefer attractive faces. Infant Behavior and Development, 21, 345–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slessor, G., Phillips, L. H., & Bull, R. (2008). Age-related declines in basic social perception: Evidence from tasks assessing eye-gaze processing. Psychology and Aging, 23, 812–822.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stanley, J. T., Lohani, M., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2014). Age-related differences in judgments of inappropriate behavior are related to humor style preferences. Psychology and Aging, 29, 528–541.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sullivan, S., & Ruffman, T. (2004). Emotion recognition deficits in the elderly. International Journal of Neuroscience, 114, 94–102.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Suzuki, A., & Akiyama, H. (2013). Cognitive aging explains age-related differences in face-based recognition of basic emotions except for anger and disgust. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition: A Journal on Normal and Dysfunctional Development, 20, 253–270.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sze, J. A., Gyurak, A., Goodkind, M. S., & Levenson, R. W. (2012). Greater emotional empathy and prosocial behavior in late life. Emotion, 12, 1129–1140.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vaillant, G. E. (2012). Triumphs of experience. Cambridge: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Verbeek, P. (1996). Peacemaking in young children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, Emory University.Google Scholar
Vicaria, I. M., Bernieri, F. J., & Isaacowitz, D. M. (2015). Perceptions of rapport across the life span: Gaze patterns and judgment accuracy. Psychology and Aging, 30, 396–406.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Walker-Andrews, A. S. (1997). Infants’ perception of expressive behaviors: Differentiation of multimodal information. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 437–456.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wellman, H. M., Lopez-Duran, S., LaBounty, J., & Hamilton, B. (2008). Infant attention to intentional action predicts preschool theory of mind. Developmental Psychology, 44, 618–623.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Widen, S. C., & Russell, J. A. (2003). A closer look at preschoolers’ freely produced labels for facial expressions. Developmental Psychology, 39, 114–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Widen, S. C., & Russell, J. A. (2010). Differentiation in preschoolers’ categories for emotion. Emotion, 10, 651–661.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Widen, S. C., & Russell, J. A. (2013). Children’s recognition of disgust in others. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 271–299.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Williams, L. M., Mathersul, D., Palmer, D. M., Gur, R. C., Gur, R. E., & Gordon, E. (2009). Explicit identification and implicit recognition of facial emotions: 1. Age effects in males and females across 10 decades. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 31, 257–277.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wong, B., Cronin-Golomb, A., & Neargarder, S. (2005). Patterns of visual scanning as predictors of emotion identification in normal aging. Neuropsychology, 19, 739–749.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Young-Browne, G., Rosenfeld, H. M., & Horowitz, F. D. (1978). Infant discrimination of facial expression. Child Development, 48, 555–562.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zebrowitz, L. A. (1997). Reading faces: Window to the soul? Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Zebrowitz, L. A., Franklin, R. G. Jr., Boshyan, J., Luevano, V., Agrigoroaei, S., Milosavljevic, B., & Lachman, M. E. (2014). Older and younger adults’ accuracy in discerning health and competence in older and younger faces. Psychology and Aging, 29, 454–468.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zebrowitz, L. A., Franklin, R. G. Jr., Hillman, S., & Boc, H. (2013). Older and younger adults’ first impressions from faces: Similar in agreement but different in positivity. Psychology and Aging, 28, 202–212.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×