Lying Becomes Difficult as We Age
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Janice Murray from the University of Otago, New Zealand present her poster research, “Age, Lies, and Faces: Emotion Recognition Mediates Age-Related Differences.”
Murray and her colleagues asked younger and older participants to identify facial emotion expressions and determine whether younger and older speakers’ opinion statements were true or false. The scientists discovered that older adults were less convincing liars and had more difficulty detecting others’ lies.
According to Murray, the key to this age-based difference lies in older adults’ diminished ability to recognized emotions. The prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulate cortex are crucial to social understanding, and these areas of the brain decrease in volume as we age.
You can learn more about lie detection and social understanding in older adults by reading coverage from the Otago Daily Times.
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