PS4045: EMOTION AND AGEING IN SOCIAL COGNITION (2026-2027)

Topics

Interpersonal communication depends upon our monitoring of the social and emotional cues of other people in order to plan and execute our own behaviour. Social cognition is a field of Psychology in which we investigate experimentally the role of cognitive mechanisms (such as attention, cognitive resource capacity, and theory of mind) in how we process social cues (such as facial expressions of emotion and gaze direction) to interact with others.

The course examines two core topics in depth.

• Joint attention – the shared attentional focus on a person, object, or event between two or more people. This involves looking where others look by utilising eye gaze signals. Eye gaze and facial expression can often work together to produce more complex and nuanced signals of what might be worth attending to in the environment according to its emotional value. For example, a person looking at an object and smiling may signal the object is pleasant and desired, while a person looking at an object with a disgust expression may signal less pleasant properties and the potential need to avoid it. How joint attention changes across the course of adult ageing will be examined. Evidence that older adults follow gaze cues less than younger people will be discussed and cognitive and motivational explanations for this pattern of age effects will be considered.
• Emotion perception. The focus in this course is the role of context on how we perceive and interpret emotional expressions in others. Core theoretical debates and related methodological issues will be evaluated. Adult aging generally correlates with lower accuracy in emotion perception tasks, but there is substantial evidence now that the nature of the task demands, including the task context, can influence the aging effects. The possible role of age-related cognitive and motivational changes with on emotion perception is considered.

Teaching Methods

The course comprises four 2-hour lectures which formally deliver the content and also involve some interactive class discussion. There will also be two 1-hour interactive class workshops related to each of the two topics and related assignments. Students should come to the workshops prepared to discuss material with others and with any related questions arising from the course. The course will run across the whole term with lecture and workshop weeks interspersed with private study weeks.

Assessment

The assessments on this course offer different ways in which students can demonstrate their understanding and communication skills. One assessment comprises a traditional academic essay; the other assessment requires students to communicate published work to the general public in text or visual format.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

More Information about Week Numbers

There are no assessments for this course.