Differential Emotional State Reasoning in Young and Older Adults: Evidence from Behavioral and Neuroimaging Data

The ability to infer the emotions, intentions, and beliefs of others has a self-protecting function in social life but declines with age. Little is known about the cerebral mechanisms underlying this impairment in older adults. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map the brain regions associated with an emotional state reasoning paradigm in which subjects were required to infer the emotion of a seen facial expression by choosing one out of four statements describing what might have happened to the depicted person. Behaviorally, empathic reasoning performance correlated inversely with age with the older subjects (42-61 years, n=12) being significantly worse than the young subjects (22-39 years, n=14) in the accuracy of empathic reasoning. FMRI showed that young and older adults recruited similar brain regions but at different time points during empathic reasoning. In the older adults, higher order control areas became engaged early during viewing the target facial expressions, while in the young adults these were first recruited when all necessary information for the decision was present. Our data suggest that older subjects employ an inefficient mechanism leading to impaired empathic reasoning.