(MSNBC) -- Having wrinkles adds well, a new wrinkle for young people trying to
gauge the emotions seen on older people's faces. A new study suggests
that younger people may make more mistakes when judging the emotions of
older folks.

To younger adults, age-related changes, such as
wrinkles and folds, look like facial expressions, so they may interfere
with the perception of emotion in an older face and perhaps convey the
wrong message.

In the study,
published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
researchers asked 65 college students to view computer-generated black
and white faces. They viewed faces of three men and three women who were
young (ages 19 to 21) or old (ages 76 to 83) displaying one of four
facial expressions: neutral, happy, sad, or angry.

Participants were asked to rate the emotional expression on the
person's face on a scale from 1 for "not at all intense" to 7 for "very
intense."

Young people were were most accurate in recognizing an
angry expression and least accurate in judging sadness in old faces.
They perceived happy faces in older people as showing less overall
emotion than a younger person.

The study found that a facial
expression, such as pure anger, on an older face is perceived
differently -- and less clearly -- than the very same expression
displayed on a younger person.

"In the case of the older
expresser, the anger is seen as mixed with other emotions,"  says lead
author Dr. Ursula Hess, a professor of psychology at Humboldt-University
in Berlin, Germany.  "Clearly it makes a difference whether you think
someone is just angry or someone is both angry and sad," she adds.

Even
when it came to a neutral face, volunteers perceived that there was
more emotion in a neutral older face than in a younger one.

Researchers suggest that wrinkles do impact the communication of emotion.

"We may make mistakes when judging the emotions of the elderly," says Hess. "This may result in less harmonious interactions."

The
age of the observers also likely made a difference in the results. Had
the study participants been closer in age to the older faces, they would
have had more experience at recognizing older faces to overcome the
difficulties posed by a less clear emotional signal, Hess explains.

Although
Botox may help smooth out the furrows and lines of an older face, it
won't make it any easier for people to gauge your emotions. The cosmetic
injections may limit facial expressions, making them harder to read.

So how can an older person make their emotions more visible -- and less obscure -- to other people?

Emotions
are usually transmitted via a number of channels, including voice and
posture, as well as the face, suggests Hess. And during everyday
interactions, expressions are more dynamic than looking at a
black-and-white photograph in a lab.

Since there are many
different sources of emotion information, "an attentive interaction
partner could learn how to properly decode the emotion," says Hess.
That's probably why older people are better at decoding other older
people's expressions.