Older adults have worse general and social cognition, but it's not just because of general cognitive decline. In a study with young and older adults, older adults did worse on all tasks, including emotion and theory-of-mind tasks. While general cognition like working memory and fluid intelligence did play a role in social cognition tasks, age was the main factor affecting performance on all social cognition tasks. This suggests that older adults struggle with social cognition even after considering general cognitive abilities, possibly due to differences in brain areas dedicated to these different types of thinking.