The ability of young and old adults to recognize emotions from vocal expressions and music performances was compared. The stimuli consisted of a) acted speech (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness; each posed with both weak and strong emotion intensity), b) synthesized speech (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness), and c) short melodies played on the electric guitar (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness; each played with both weak and strong emotion intensity). Both groups of listeners rated the stimuli using forced-choice and also rated the emotion intensity of each stimulus. Results showed emotion-specific age-related differences in recognition accuracy. Old adults consistently received significantly lower recognition accuracy for negative, but not for positive, emotions across all types of stimuli. Age-related differences in recognition of emotion intensity were also found. The results show the importance of considering individual emotions in studies on age-related differences in emotion recognition.