Embodied Emotion Concepts and Aging: Differences in Older versus Younger Adults' Emotion Concepts (2015)

Undergraduates: Brian Davis, Jennifer MacCormack

Faculty Advisor: Kristen Lindquist
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Growing evidence suggests that concepts are embodied and represented by sensorimotor representations of internal feelings, exteroceptive sensations, and actions (for review, Kiefer & Barsalou, 2013). Yet bodily feedback from the nervous system becomes less intense or clear with older age, giving rise to "maturational dualism" (Mendes, 2010). Maturational dualism suggests that aging adults may rely less on interoceptive feedback to inform their emotion conceptualizations.

The present studies are a first step towards understanding the nature of older adults¿¿¿ emotion conceptualization. To do so we compare older and younger adults¿¿¿ interoceptive, behavioral, and situational conceptualizations of discrete emotion to determine if older adults do indeed rely less on interoceptive emotion properties than younger adults do.

In the present studies, we adapted a property verification task from embodied cognitive methods (Pecher et al., 2003) to help us assess the difference between older and younger adults¿¿¿ modalities of emotion-relevant experience. Specifically, we hypothesize that older adults rely less on the interoceptive modality of their experience and focus more on the externalities of the current situation (such as emotion-relevant behaviors like smiling or frowning) and also their cognitive appraisals (which tap into the situational properties of emotion¿¿¿such as a situation that is unjust, or where harm is being done) when making situated conceptualization.