Social Communication Across the Lifespan: The Influence of Empathy

Abstract

Studies testing the effects of aging on social communication have mainly focused on one sensory modality, for example using written vignettes. In the current study, we examine the effect of healthy aging, empathy, and anxiety traits on a social communication task using video stimuli that reflect real-world interactions. By means of an online recruitment platform, we asked young, middle-aged, and older adults between the ages 18 and 76 (N=100) to evaluate videos of actors using different forms of literal and nonliteral language, such as sarcasm or teasing. The participants’ task was to infer the speakers’ belief and the speaker’s intention, and we also collected data on self-reported social anxiety levels and empathy. Older participants demonstrated lower accuracy in discriminating nonliteral from literal interactions compared to younger and middle-aged groups, while older adults with higher perspective-taking scores were more accurate at identifying teasing as nonliteral. This effect was partially mediated by empathy. When evaluating speaker intentions, older adults judged sarcasm as friendlier compared to literal negative utterances. Our results expand on age-related similarities and differences in evaluating speaker intentions and we discuss our results in the context of the Tinge Hypothesis.

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