The Psychology Colloquium series returned to Penn State Behrend for the sixth year this past Friday, September 15.

Jennifer Tehan Stanley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Akron, spoke to students, faculty and staff about her extensive research on older and younger adults and their ability to recognize facial expressions and emotions.

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Her talk, “FaceTime with Grandma: Do We Grow Older and Wiser When Reading Facial Expressions?”, included four different studies. Study one dealt with age, emotions and target familiarity. For this study, Stanley asked participants to guess the emotion that people were feeling from their facial expressions. The options were anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad surprise and neutral.

Stanley expected emotion perception to be greater for familiar partners when compared to strangers and that age differences in emotion perception would be attenuated in the familiar condition.

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Stanley mentioned that older adults usually prioritize relationships with close social partners because of the timeframe they have in life. Stanley stated that older adults have trouble with recognizing anger, sadness, and fear according to her results. There were also significant differences with recognizing surprise and happiness.

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Stanley talked about her results of this study and how it affects older adults.

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“Older adults report they are able to maintain and improve their emotional experience and experimentally that is also what has been found,” Stanley said. “Older adults are also better at avoiding interpersonal conflict than young adults and are more effective at solving interpersonal problems than young adults.”

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Stanley believes that the results are not an accident that the results make sense to everyday life.

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Stanley stated, “We believe this is no accident. The fact that older adults seem to be maintaining or improving their emotional experience. Older adults may be actually prioritizing that emotional experience.”

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For the second study, Stanley focused on what the consequences are if older adults have trouble recognizing emotions. Stanley mentioned in her talk that overall, everyone is bad at detecting if people are lying. Stanley also stated that prior research found that when someone is lying, there are key ques called micro expressions that let others find out when people are lying. One example of this is called duping delight. This is a smirk or little bit of joy that comes out when you get away with your lie. The liar does not know that they give out these ques about lying.

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Stanley wanted to know that if older adults are less able to detect emotion perception, are they less likely to pick up on someone lying. Stanley showed videos of people getting questioned and the participants had to guess if the person was lying or not about their answers to the questions.

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In her results Stanley states, “Older adults are significantly worse than young.”

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Stanley related the two studies together and mentioned that, “The better you were at detecting shame and fear, the better you were at recognize deceit.”

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Stanley’s third study dealt with age, deceit detection and target familiarity. She did the same study as before but with romantic couples that have been together for at least six months. This was broken into two sessions where they had to watch videos from their significant other and then later had to come back and do it again with strangers. Stanley believed that the participants would be more accurate at detecting deceit in a familiar partner than a stranger and that age differences in deceit detection would be attenuated in the familiar partner condition relative to the stranger condition.

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Results showed, “People were significantly more accurate at detecting deception in their familiar partner than a young adult stranger or an older adult stranger.” This supported the hypothesis of the study.

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A surprising find was that, “Older adults are better at detecting deceit in their familiar partner than young adults are.”

The last study focused on if age differences and emotion perception extended to more complex social judgements. Participants were shown clips of comedy shows and asked to rate the inappropriateness of the main character and how humorous it was. An example of a clip shown was a segment from The Office.

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Stanley hypothesized that young and older adults would be equal with rating the inappropriateness of the comedy shows but that older adults would rate the inappropriate clips less funny.

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The results suggested, “Young and older adults were both able to discriminate well between inappropriate clips and control clips,” Stanley said. “Young adults found the inappropriate clips more funny.” These results supported the hypothesis.  

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Over all, the studies allowed Stanley to make certain conclusions such as researches should consider the underlying cause for age-related differences.

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After Stanley’s talk, students and faculty could ask questions about the research.

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The Colloquium Series in Psychological Sciences and Human Behavior event is hosted by Penn State Behrend’s Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science in Psychology degree programs. It is also hosted by the student Psychology Coalition with support from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. For additional information on this talk and future talks, contact Carol Wilson, associate professor of psychology at Penn State Behrend.