Prior research indicates that there may be age-related differences in visual attention to emotional faces, and that this might contribute to older adults' difficulties perceiving emotional facial displays. However, the nature and magnitude of age differences in gaze patterns have been inconsistent. Study 1 therefore used meta-analytic methodology to quantify age effects in gazing to the eyes and mouths of faces in standard emotion perception tasks. The results showed that older adults displayed a moderate bias to look less at the eyes compared to younger adults (g = -.66), and a small bias to look more at the mouth (g = .32). However, for gazing at the eyes, the largest age effects were evident in response to emotionally neutral faces, suggesting that these visual biases reflect broader age-related differences in face processing, and not differences in how emotions specifically are processed. Also consistent with this possibility was the absence of any association between gaze patterns and emotion perception accuracy. Study 2 then provided the first empirical test of age-related differences in gaze patterns using a sample of young, middle-aged, and older adults. Again, older adults looked less at the eyes compared to younger adults. However, of particular interest was the finding that these visual biases appear to represent a linear decline. As with Study 1, no relationships emerged between emotion perception accuracy and gaze patterns. Together, these findings show that aging is associated with visual biases to facial stimuli that are unrelated to older adults' ability to perceive emotional displays. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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在整个成年人的生命周期中，将表情凝视到情绪化的面孔。

先前的研究表明，对情感面孔的视觉关注可能存在与年龄相关的差异，这可能会导致老年人感知情感面部表情时遇到困难。但是，凝视模式中年龄差异的性质和大小并不一致。因此，研究1使用荟萃分析方法来量化年龄在标准情感感知任务中注视面部的眼睛和嘴巴的影响。结果表明，与年轻成年人相比，老年人表现出中等偏见以较少的眼神（g = -.66），而在成年人中表现出较小偏见以更多的眼神（g = .32）。但是，对于凝视眼睛而言，对情绪中立的脸部响应最大的年龄效应是显而易见的，这表明这些视觉偏见反映出与年龄相关的更广泛的面部处理差异，而不是在处理情感方面有差异。同样与这种可能性一致的是，注视模式和情绪感知准确性之间没有任何关联。然后，研究2使用了年轻人，中年和老年人的样本，对年龄相关的凝视模式差异进行了首次实证检验。同样，与年轻人相比，老年人的眼神少。然而，特别令人感兴趣的是发现这些视觉偏差似乎代表线性下降。与研究1一样，情感感知的准确性与注视模式之间也没有关系。总之，这些发现表明，衰老与面部刺激的视觉偏见有关，而偏见与老年人感知情感展示的能力无关。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。