Date of Award

5-2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Honors Thesis

Department

Neuroscience

First Advisor

Tara Lineweaver

Second Advisor

Tonya Bergeson

Abstract

Emotional prosody recognition is crucial for social interactions but is influenced by aging, gender, and age-related hearing loss (Lambrecht et al., 2012; Oerlemans et al., 2014; Palermo et al., 2013). No past studies have looked at all of these factors collectively. To address this shortcoming, the current study explored the relationships between aging, hearing loss and gender differences in emotional prosody recognition. The ability to recognize emotions through facial expressions was also included as a comparative measure. One hundred fifteen individuals (42 men and 73 women), ages 50 and older (M = 60.39, SD = 8.12), completed a hearing handicap questionnaire, a demographic questionnaire and objective measures of both prosody and facial expression recognition. Results revealed that neither age nor hearing loss significantly predicted emotional prosody or facial expression recognition for the women in the sample. In contrast, age significantly predicted men’s ability to accurately recognize prosody, and hearing loss was, unexpectedly, a significant predictor of men’s ability to accurately recognize emotions through facial expressions. This study has important implications for healthy aging because the ability to recognize emotion in others during social interactions is essential to maintaining healthy relationships across the lifespan. Our results indicate that this ability seems to depend on different factors for men than women.

Download

Share

COinS