• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.33-42
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• 2023

Previous emotion studies employing facial expressions have focused on the differences between age groups for each of the emotion categories. Instead, Kim (2021) has compared representations of facial expressions in the lower-dimensional emotion space. However, he reported descriptive comparisons without statistical significance testing. This research used representational similarity analysis (Kriegeskorte et al., 2008) to directly compare empirical datasets from young, middle-aged, and old groups and conceptual models. In addition, individual differences multidimensional scaling (Carroll & Chang, 1970) was conducted to explore individual weights on the emotional dimensions for each age group. The results revealed that the old group was the least similar to the other age groups in the empirical datasets and the valence model. In addition, the arousal dimension was the least weighted for the old group compared to the other groups. This study directly tested the differences between the three age groups in terms of empirical datasets, conceptual models, and weights on the emotion dimensions.