Monday, April 17th from 12-1 pm 

College of Arts and Sciences, room 124

Summary of Research:

Older adults are less accurate at identifying facial expressions of emotion than young adults. A typical emotion perception task requires participants to identify the emotion presented on a series of standardized photographs of faces expressing anger, disgust, joy, fear, sadness, surprise, or neutral (no emotion). Research shows that older adults’ deficit in emotion identification can have serious consequences such as rendering them less accurate at identifying someone as lying, which may make older adults more vulnerable to falling prey to fraud or scams. However, expertise in a domain can sometimes reduce or eliminate age deficits. To test whether expertise at identifying facial expressions of emotion can buffer against the age-related declines seen in emotion perception, the present study proposes to compare age differences in emotion perception accuracy among deaf users of American Sign Language (ASL) to hearing individuals unfamiliar with ASL.

Researcher Bio:

Dr. Stanley earned her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a focus in Cognitive Aging, from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. After postdoctoral work at Brandeis University and the Behavioral Research Program of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Stanley joined the faculty of the Psychology Department at UA, where she directs the Emotions and Aging Lab. Dr. Stanley studies socioemotional functioning across the lifespan, focusing on two broad areas of aging and emotional life: emotion recognition and emotion regulation. Her publications have appeared in Developmental Psychology, Psychology and Aging, and The Journal of Gerontology.