The effect of emotion on the own-age memory bias

Previous research has found that children, young and older adults show an Own Age Bias (OAB). However, results have reported no differences in recognition of middle- and young-age faces between young and older participants. Consequently, it has been suggested that young adults display an OAB when there is a substantial age gap in the stimuli used but not when the difference is smaller. Another line of research has suggested that if people tend to have greater contact with others who belong to the same group, it follows that preferential processing is given to in-group faces as they are deemed socially relevant, which results in more accurate recognition. Recently, research has also used emotional stimuli to disentangle the relative contribution of both perceptual-expertise and social-categorisation perspectives. However, evidence is not consistent as some studies have reported emotion-specific OAB for sad faces in older people, while others have failed to observe an emotion specific OAB either for young or older adults. It is still unclear whether happy expressions eliminate the OAB because they are more visually salient stimuli, or whether other expressions would have the same effect. The present study investigated whether young adults showed an own-age memory advantage for neutral faces but not for emotional faces. To this end participants completed a face-task, in which they were instructed to categorise per age-group each face -that could display either neutral, angry, or sad expressions-. After a brief break, they were asked to respond if the faces had already been presented or not.