In the sadness experiment, participants rated 4 groups of faces for how sad they look. Some of the faces had been changed in their configuration (shape of facial features) to be more similar to the faces of older people and other faces had been changed to have configurations more similar to younger people. Another group had been changed to have a very subtle sad expression.
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| Younger face configuration | Older face configuration | Sad face configuration |
In tests of how well people can detect emotional expressions, older people are often less good at detecting sadness. We also know that looking at many faces of a certain type can make that face type seem more “normal”. We thought that older people might have a face configuration that is more similar to sad faces and that older people might see older faces more often than younger people do. This might make sad faces look more neutral to older people and reduce their ability to detect sadness.
In this experiment, we looked at whether the face shape and demeanor of young and old faces differ in how sad the faces appear. We also looked at changes in the sadness trials of the same faces that had been changed to look slightly sad. These faces were shown after exposure to faces with a younger configuration and again after faces with an older confiiguration. This will help us understand why responses to old and young faces are different.
| Faces Rated | Average Sadness Rating |
|---|---|
| Older Faces | 3.03 |
| Sad Faces After Seeing Older Faces | 3.34 |
| Younger Faces | 2.99 |
| Sad Faces After Seeing Younger Faces | 3.53 |
As we predicted, the sad faces looked less sad after participants had viewed the faces with an older configuration than after particpants had viewed the faces with a younger configuration. Faces with an older configuration also looked slightly sadder than the same faces with a younger configuration.