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Affective prosody recognition among older adults (Fan et al., 2024)

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posted on 2024-09-26, 13:13 authored by Xinran Fan, Enze Tang, Minyue Zhang, Yi Lin, Hongwei Ding, Yang Zhang

Purpose: Understanding how older adults perceive and interpret emotional cues in speech prosody contributes to our knowledge of cognitive aging. This study provides a systematic review with meta-analysis to investigate the extent of the decline in affective prosody recognition (APR) among older adults in terms of overall and emotion-specific performance and explore potential moderators that may cause between-studies heterogeneity.

Method: The literature search encompassed five electronic databases, with a specific emphasis on studies comparing the APR performance of older adults with that of younger adults. This comparison was focused on basic emotions. Meta-regression analyses were executed to pinpoint potential moderators related to demographic and methodological characteristics.

Results: A total of 19 studies were included in the meta-analysis, involving 560 older adults with a mean age of 69.15 years and 751 younger adults with a mean age of 23.02 years. The findings indicated a substantial negative effect size (g = −1.21). Furthermore, the magnitude of aggregated effect sizes showed a distinct valence-related recognition pattern with positive prosody exhibiting smaller effect sizes. Language background and years of education were found to moderate the overall and emotion-specific (i.e., disgust and surprise) performance effect estimate, and age and gender significantly influenced the effect estimate of happiness.

Conclusions: The results confirmed a significant decline in APR ability among older adults compared to younger adults, but this decline was unbalanced across basic emotions. Language background and educational level emerged as significant factors influencing older adults’ APR ability. Moreover, participants with a higher mean age exhibited notably poorer performance in recognizing happy prosody. These findings underscore the need to further investigate the neurobiological mechanisms for APR decline associated with aging.

Supplemental Material S1. Influence analyses.

Supplemental Material S2. Contour-enhanced funnel plot (affective prosody recognition in older adults).

Supplemental Material S3. Trim-and-fill analysis with all studies included or the outlier removed.

Supplemental Material S4. PRISMA checklist.

Supplemental Material S5. Summary of results for the overall APR accuracy of older adults compared with that of younger participants in each included study.

Fan, X., Tang, E., Zhang, M., Lin, Y., Ding, H., & Zhang, Y. (2024). Decline of affective prosody recognition with a positivity bias among older adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-23-00775

Funding

This study was funded by grants from the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China (18ZDA293 awarded to Hongwei Ding). Yang Zhang received additional support from University of Minnesota’s Brain Imaging Grant and Seed Grant.

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