Everyday Socioemotional Perception in the Context of Aging

 描述(由申请者提供)：老年人报告在包括幸福感和生活满意度在内的领域取得了进展，尽管他们在社会情绪感知方面经历了下降，这一技能可能是这些领域表现的基础。这项提议的主要目标是通过一种方法来促进我们对老年人日常社会情感感知技能的理解，这种方法识别老年人在日常生活中所做的社会情感判断，作为一种手段来创造在实验室环境中使用的生态有效刺激。具体地说，这项拟议的研究将调查老年人对社交和情绪状态的感知，以及通过一系列研究隐藏或表达的特征，这些研究将共同评估：1)老年人日常的社会情绪感知技能，以及2)在实验室任务中对社交和情绪状态和特征的感知的年龄差异，这些任务与日常技能相似。在研究1中，将采用在线调查设计，对老年人和年轻人在现实生活中报告的社交、情绪状态和特质判断的类型进行分类。参与者还将报告这些判断对他们的社会功能是否重要，以及他们是否认为自己的判断是成功的。研究2将利用这些发现为一项实验室任务设计刺激，以评估对隐藏或表达的情绪状态的感知。然后，这项任务将在研究3中对年轻人和老年人进行抽样调查，以确定老年人在准确感知情绪状态方面是否表现出优势，以及在一项具有生态有效性和代表日常技能的任务中，与年轻人相比，这些状态是隐藏的还是表现出来的。研究4将再次借鉴研究1的发现，为评估包括能力特征在内的社会特征感知的实验室任务设计生态有效的刺激；因此，刺激将包括目标能力被表达或对感知者隐藏的情况。这项任务随后将在研究5中对年轻人和老年人的样本进行测试，以测试能力知觉的年龄差异，以及显示显性能力和隐藏能力的图像之间的区别。总而言之，这些研究的结果将有助于我们理解老年人感知他人情绪状态和社会特征的技能。很可能，文献中经常观察到的与年龄相关的自我情绪知觉下降的模式至少部分是由于实验室方法的作用，这些方法不能充分反映老年人在日常生活中的真实技能。因此，这项拟议的研究可能会对情绪和衰老提出更准确、更积极的观点。具体地说，拟议的研究可能表明，与年轻人相比，老年人在社会情感感知技能方面取得了进步，因为这些技能是老年人在其他领域表现出进步的不可或缺的功能。此外，这项拟议的研究通过提出一种生态上有效的方法来检验实验室中社会情绪知觉的年龄差异，并可能被其他研究人员采用，从而为该领域做出了贡献。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Older adults report gains in domains including well-being and life satisfaction, despite experiencing declines in socio-emotional perception, a skill that likely underlies performance in these domains. The primary goal of this proposal is to advance our understanding of older adults' everyday socio-emotional perception skills using an approach that identifies the socio-emotional judgments older adults make in their everyday lives as a means to create ecologically valid stimuli for use in laboratory settings. Specifically, the proposed research will investigate older adults' perception of social and emotional states and traits that are hidden or expressed through a series of studies that will collectively assess: 1) older adults' everyday socio-emotional perception skills, and 2) age differences in the perception of social and emotional states and traits on laboratory tasks that approximate everyday skills. In Study 1, an online survey design will be employed to catalogue the types of social and emotional state and trait judgments older and younger adults report making in real life. Participants will also report whether such judgments are important to their social functioning, and whether they perceive their judgments as successful. Study 2 will use these findings to design stimuli for a laboratory task that assess the perception of emotional states that are hidden or expressed. This task will then be administered to a sample of younger and older adults in Study 3 to determine whether older adults demonstrate advantages in accurately perceiving emotional states and in determining whether these states are hidden or expressed as compared to younger adults on a task that is ecologically valid and representative of everyday skill. Study 4 will again draw on findings from Study 1 to design ecologically valid stimuli for a laboratory task that assesses the perception of social traits, including the trait of competence; stimuli will thus include cases where a target's competence is expressed or hidden from the perceiver. This task will subsequently be administered in Study 5 to a sample of younger and older adults to test for age differences in the perception of competence and the discrimination between images displaying expressed competence versus hidden competence. Together, results from these studies will inform our understanding of older adults' skills in perceiving others' emotional states and social traits. It is likely that patterns of age-related decline in soio-emotional perception often observed in the literature exist at least in part as a function of laboratory methods that do not adequately reflect older adults' true skills in daily life. Thus, th proposed research may present a more accurate and also more positive view of emotion and aging. Specifically, the proposed research may demonstrate that older adults experience gains in socio-emotional perception skills compared to younger adults, as these skills are integral to functioning in other domains in which older adults have demonstrated gains. Further, the proposed research contributes to the field by proposing an ecologically valid approach to examine age differences in socio-emotional perception in the laboratory that may be adopted by other researchers.