Emotion Communication by the Aging Face and Body: A Multidisciplinary View

As our society ages, questions concerning the relations between generations gain importance. The quality of human relations depends on the quality of emotion communication, which is a significant part of our daily interactions. Emotion expressions serve not only to communicate how the expresser feels, but also to communicate intentions (whether to approach or retreat) and personality traits (such as dominance, trustworthiness, or friendliness) that influence our decisions regarding whether and how to interact with a person. Emotion Communication by the Aging Face and Body delineates how aging affects emotion communication and person perception by bringing together research across multiple disciplines. Scholars and graduate students in the psychology of aging, affective science, and social gerontology will benefit from this over-view and theoretical framework.

Ursula Hess is Professor of Psychology at Humboldt-University zu Berlin, Germany and President of the International Society for Research on Emotion. Her research focuses on emotion communication, particularly nonverbal synchronization (mimicry) and the role of emotion expressions on impression formation. She has more than 200 scholarly publications, including five books.

Reginald B. Adams, Jr. is Professor of Psychology at Penn State University, USA and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. His research focuses on how social visual cues perceptually combine to form the unified representations that guide our impressions of and responses to others. He has more than 100 scholarly publications, including two books.

Robert E. Kleck is Emeritus Professor at Dartmouth College, USA. His research has focused on the social psychological implications of physical appearance, particularly those that are stigmatizing, and more recently the interaction of facial appearance and facial expression in determining both emotional attribution and person perception outcomes.