The impact of aging on the neural networks involved in gaze and emotional processing

Maryam Ziaei; Hana Burianová; William von Hippel; Natalie C Ebner; Louise H Phillips; Julie D Henry

doi:10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2016.08.026

The impact of aging on the neural networks involved in gaze and emotional processing

Neurobiol Aging. 2016 Dec:48:182-194. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2016.08.026. Epub 2016 Sep 6.

Authors

Maryam Ziaei¹, Hana Burianová², William von Hippel³, Natalie C Ebner⁴, Louise H Phillips⁵, Julie D Henry³

Affiliations

¹ Centre for Advanced Imaging, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Electronic address: maryamziae@gmail.com.
² Centre for Advanced Imaging, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; Department of Psychology, Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, UK.
³ School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA; Department of Aging and Geriatric Research, Cognitive Aging and Memory Program, Clinical Translational Research Program (CAM-CTRP), Institute on Aging, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
⁵ School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.

PMID: 27716474
DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2016.08.026

Abstract

Normal adult aging is associated with difficulties in processing social cues to emotions such as anger and also altered motivation to focus more on positive than negative information. Gaze direction is an important modifier of the social signals conveyed by an emotion, for example, an angry face looking directly at you is considerably more threatening than an angry face looking away. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that older adults would show less neural differentiation to angry faces with direct and avert gaze compared to younger people, with the opposite prediction for happy faces. Healthy older (65-75 years; mean = 69.75) and younger (17-27 years; mean = 20.65) adults completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment in which they were asked to identify happy and angry expressions displayed either with direct or averted gaze. While younger adults showed neural sensitivity to eye-gaze direction during recognition of angry expressions, older adults showed no effect of eye-gaze direction on neural response. In contrast, older adults showed sensitivity to eye-gaze direction during recognition of happy expressions but younger adults did not. Additionally, brain-behavior correlations were conducted to investigate the relationships between emotion recognition and mentalizing brain network in both age groups. Younger (but not older) adults' social cognitive performance was differentially correlated with activation in 2 brain networks when looking at angry faces with direct compared to averted gaze. These novel findings provide evidence for age-related differences in the neural substrates underlying the capacity to integrate facial affect and eye-gaze cues. The results of this study suggest that age-related differences in integrating facial cues may be related to engagement of the mentalizing network, with potentially important implications for social cognitive functioning in late adulthood.

Keywords: Aging; Dedifferentiation; Emotional expressions; Eye gaze; Mentalizing; PLS; Social cognition.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Aged
Aging / physiology*
Aging / psychology*
Anger / physiology
Cues
Emotions / physiology*
Female
Fixation, Ocular / physiology*
Happiness
Humans
Male
Mental Processes / physiology*
Nerve Net / physiology*