How Do Static and Dynamic Emotional Faces Prime Incremental Semantic Interpretation?: Comparing Older and Younger Adults

Using eye-tracking, two studies investigated whether a dynamic vs. static emotional facial expression can influence how a listener interprets a subsequent emotionally-valenced utterance in relation to a visual context. Crucially, we assessed whether such facial priming changes with the comprehender’s age (younger vs. older adults). Participants inspected a static (Experiment 1, Carminati & Knoeferle, 2013) or a dynamic (Experiment 2) facial expression that was either happy or sad. After inspecting the face, participants saw two pictures of opposite valence (positive and negative; presented at the same time) and heard an either positively or negatively valenced sentence describing one of these two pictures. Participants’ task was to look at the display, understand the sentence, and to decide whether the facial expression matched the sentence. The emotional face influenced visual attention on the pictures and during the processing of the sentence, and these influences were modulated by age. Older adults were more strongly influenced by the positive prime face whereas younger adults were more strongly influenced by the negative facial expression. These results suggest that the negativity and the positivity bias observed in visual attention in young and older adults respectively extend to face-sentence priming. However, static and dynamic emotional faces had similar priming effects on sentence processing.