Most studies that address emotion recognition have attempted to determine whether older adults showed an age-related decline in facial expression recognition. In our study, we decided to use a new approach, by focusing specifically on differents cues which permit a person to identify an emotion in others. Thus, we asked young and older people to decide which emotion (sadness or joy) was felt by a main character in a video. The subjects could rely on either facial expression, prosody or context to identify the emotion. To determine which cue was privileged by subjects, the valence of these 3 cues was incongruent (for example: smiling face, sad prosody and sad context). The results show that face processing is central in emotion recognition particularly in young adults, whereas for older adults the context also had a substantial place.