This decline also affects people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and individuals who have experienced a stroke.
When you speak with older relatives, do they sometimes seem unmoved by your sadness or indifferent to stories about events that amazed you? If so, don’t hold it against them—this lack of reaction may be explained by the fact that the ability to understand emotions conveyed through vocal modulations decreases with age. This is what a study recently published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research by a Université Laval research team has shown.
The research team reached this conclusion after comparing the ability to decode affective prosody in young adults and older individuals. “Affective prosody is the acoustic modulation of the voice that allows emotions to be conveyed. It is more important in daily life than we realize because, just like words, facial expressions and gestures, it carries essential information for communication,” explains the lead author of the study, Laura Monetta, professor at the School of Rehabilitation Sciences and researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Rehabilitation and Social Integration at Université Laval.
