Here, they demonstrated an inverted U-shaped trajectory for emotion perception ability. An increase in the ability to correctly label facial emotional expressions was found during childhood and adolescence, PLX-4720 mw while in (older) adults, the overall emotion perception ability deteriorated especially for the emotions fear, sadness, and happiness. Thus, existing studies point towards an ageing-related decline in the ability to perceive the negative emotions anger, fear and sadness, while reporting a clear improvement in overall emotion perception during development. Another
factor potentially affecting emotion perception is sex. For example, Campbell et al. (2002) showed a more accurate performance in women for the emotions anger and disgust. In addition, Montagne, Kessels, Frigerio, De Haan, and Perrett (2005) demonstrated sex differences in the advantage of women for the emotions sadness, surprise, anger, and disgust. Whittle, Yücel, Yap, and Allen (2011) reviewed the literature on sex differences for emotion perception in relation to neuroimaging, and showed that females displayed higher temporal-limbic activation levels than men during emotion perception, even if the performance accuracy did not differ between men and women. While
most studies showed a female advantage in emotion perception, mixed results have been reported with respect GDC-0973 cell line to the selectivity of the findings, possibly also due to methodological issues (see Kret & De Gelder, 2012, for a review). Finally, other cognitive functions have been found to affect emotion perception. For example, it has been suggested
that overall ageing-related cognitive decline may explain the overall decrements in emotion perception, but this cannot explain the selectivity of some of the findings (Ruffman et al., 2008). For example, a find more recent study by Suzuki and Akiyama (2012) showed that overall cognitive ability could not account for ageing-related decline in the ability to perceive anger and disgust. Also, difference in intellectual ability have been found to uniquely affect perception of the emotions anger, surprise, and disgust (Horning et al., 2012). As many emotion perception tasks require participants to label emotions verbally, verbal intellectual ability should be taken into account when examining individual differences in emotion perception (Montebarocci, Surcinelli, Rossi, & Baldaro, 2011). An example of an emotion perception task that is widely used in clinical practice is the Ekman 60 Faces Test included in the FEEST (Young, Perrett, Cabler, Sprengelmeyer, & Ekman, 2002). In this test, 60 black and white photographs of full-blown, easy-to-recognize facial expressions of the six basic emotions are presented (male and female).