How emotion regulation shapes facial emotion recognition in younger and older adults

Abstract

Facial emotion recognition and emotion regulation both undergo systematic changes with age, yet these domains have rarely been studied together. The present study examined how habitual emotion regulation strategies—cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression—relate to facial emotion recognition in younger and older adults. We compared 76 older adults (≥65 years; M =83.74 years) and 64 younger adults (18–30 years; M =22 years), all cognitively unimpaired and clinically pre-screened. By design, the older sample was restricted to individuals with preserved global cognition (MoCA ≥ 26) in order to isolate emotional from cognitive contributions to age-related recognition differences. Participants completed a forced-choice identification task with six high-intensity basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, fear) and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Older adults showed reduced recognition accuracy across all emotions except happiness, with the largest decrements for sadness, anger, surprise, and fear, and reported higher expressive suppression and comparable cognitive reappraisal relative to younger adults. Linear mixed-effects models showed that age differences in recognition were not attenuated by adjusting for regulation strategies, sex, education or depressive symptoms. Critically, the functional coupling between regulation and recognition differed qualitatively across age groups: in older adults, cognitive reappraisal predicted overall recognition while suppression did not; in younger adults, the pattern reversed. This double dissociation suggests an age-dependent reconfiguration of the functional links between regulation and perception, evident in cognitively preserved older adults and therefore not reducible to global cognitive decline.