Age and Sex Differences in Emotion Perception are Influenced by Emotional Category and Communication Channel

Sex differences in verbal and nonverbal emotion processing in older individuals are underexplored despite declining emotional performance with age. This study aimed to investigate the nature of sex differences in age-related decline in emotion perception, exploring modulatory effects on communication channels and emotion categories. Seventy-three older adults (43 female participants, aged 60–89 years) and 74 younger adults (37 female participants, aged 18–30 years) completed a task to recognize basic emotions (i.e., anger, happiness, neutrality, sadness) expressed by female or male encoders through verbal (i.e., semantic) and nonverbal (i.e., facial and prosodic) channels. Female participants consistently demonstrated an overall advantage in emotion perception and expression across both age cohorts. In older adults, this superiority was heightened in decoding angry and sad faces, as well as angry prosody and happy and sad semantics. However, older individuals exhibited decreased sensitivities to angry semantics, sad prosody, and neutral prosody from female encoders, whereas they showed heightened sensitivities to happy faces from female encoders and angry faces from male encoders. Both older and younger adults displayed age-related changes in sex interactions specific to emotional categories and channels. But neither own-sex nor opposite-sex bias was systematically observed across the two age groups. These results suggest that explicit emotion processing involves an intricate integration of individual and contextual differences, with significant age and sex interplay linked to specific emotions and channels.