Abstract
The effects of age, affect valence, and cerebral asymmetry on emotional response bias and response time in the discrimination of affective facial stimuli were examined. Subjects were 11 college-aged and 11 elderly women, all of whom were right-handed. The subjects were required to identify the affect depicted in Ekman and Friesen’s (1978) stimuli of angry, happy, and neutral faces by using a forced-choice reaction time paradigm with only “angry” or “happy” response alternatives signified by the respective response manipulanda. The stimuli were presented to the left and right visual fields tachistoscopically. The results showed faster affect identification by the younger women, a faster learning rate for positive affect than for negative affect, and no significantly faster identification of affect with right hemisphere (LVF) presentation. The younger and elderly women differed in the forced identification of neutral stimuli, revealing a heightened LVF positive affective bias among the elderly women. The results lend support to the hypothesis of a relative right-hemisphere decline with age.
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Billings, L.S., Harrison, D.W. & Alden, J.D. Age differences among women in the functional asymmetry for bias in facial affect perception. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 31, 317–320 (1993). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334940
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334940