Background

For decades, the nature of emotions has been at the center of psychological research, particularly regarding the underlying mechanisms that enable people to perceive, recognize, and process emotional stimuli. Research has indicated that there are interindividual differences in the processing of emotions. This includes age, which underlies neurological changes that contribute to the specific processing of emotions. Increasing age seems to be associated with a more positive evaluation of emotional information, from perception itself to attention, memory, and decision-making.

Method

The current study aimed to investigate whether these differences can be found in highly artificial emotional faces. Since emojis are representatives of emotional faces in digital communication, we selected a subset of 13 emojis and asked 170 participants to evaluate them for their ability to represent different target emotions.

Results

An exploratory factor analysis revealed a two-factorial structure with positive and negative valence for most of the ratings for the evaluated emojis. Furthermore, a multilevel model analysis based on the individual factor scores indicated higher age to be associated with an increase in factor scores for negative valence compared to positive valence.

Conclusion

In the present study, a trend for an age-specific positivity bias could only be shown in the classical smiley, while other emojis were related to negative valence with increasing age. Thus, we revealed age-related differences in emotion classification, even for highly artificial stimuli such as emojis.

中文翻译：

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表情符号评估中与年龄相关的差异。

背景

几十年来，情绪的性质一直是心理学研究的中心，特别是在使人们能够感知，识别和处理情绪刺激的潜在机制方面。研究表明，在情绪处理上存在个体差异。这包括年龄，该年龄是有助于特定情绪处理的神经系统变化的基础。从感知本身到注意力，记忆和决策，年龄的增长似乎与情感信息的更积极评价有关。

方法

当前的研究旨在调查在高度人造的情绪面孔中是否可以发现这些差异。由于表情符号是数字通信中情感面孔的代表，因此我们选择了13个表情符号的子集，并邀请170名参与者对其进行表示的不同目标情感进行评估。

结果

探索性因素分析显示，对于所评估表情符号的大多数评分，两因素结构具有正价和负价。此外，基于各个因子得分的多层次模型分析表明，与正价相比，年龄越高，负价的因子得分越高。

结论

在本研究中，仅在经典笑脸中可以显示出特定于年龄的阳性倾向的趋势，而其他表情符号则随着年龄的增长而与负价有关。因此，我们揭示了情绪分类中与年龄相关的差异，即使是表情符号等高度人工刺激也是如此。