Abstract: Objective To investigate gender differences in affective prosody comprehension (APC) and their associations with dysfunctional attitudes and cognitive function among cognitively healthy older adults. Methods Using the Mandarin Auditory Emotion Stimulus Database, we assessed the APC ability for seven emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral) in 199 community-dwelling older adults without cognitive impairment. Dysfunctional attitudes were evaluated using the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale, and cognitive function was assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment scale. Partial Least Squares regression was used to analyze the relationships among the variables. Results Older women showed higher accuracy and shorter reaction times in APC, with particularly significant advantages in recognizing happiness, fear, and disgust. Older men were more likely to misclassify negative emotions as neutral or positive emotions. The gender differences in APC accuracy among older adults were associated with the gender differences in dysfunctional attitudes, while the gender differences in APC reaction time were associated with the gender difference in visuospatial ability. Furthermore, APC accuracy in older adults was correlated with scores in visuospatial function, language ability, delayed memory, attention, abstract thinking, and naming dimensions. Conclusions There are significant gender differences in both accuracy and reaction time of APC among older adults, and APC accuracy is positively correlated with cognitive function. Older men exhibit poorer APC performance and a higher rate of misjudgment of negative emotions, which may be related to their lower scores in dysfunctional attitudes.

Key words: aged, affective prosody comprehension, gender difference, dysfunctional attitude, cognitive function