Perceiving emotionally incongruent cues from faces and bodies: Older adults get the whole picture

Older adults have poor recognition of isolated facial expressions, yet outside the lab, such faces are typically perceived with contextual expressive bodies. In fact, recent work suggests that real-life facial expressions may be ambiguous while contextual information such as body language may be more diagnostic for decoding emotions. We examined the recognition of emotion from incongruent face-body composites and found that compared to young adults, older adults gave the body far more weight when recognizing emotion. These results are consistent with a social-expertise view and suggest that in real-life, older adults may employ an advantageous holistic approach to emotion perception.