Face masks influence emotion judgments of facial expressions: A drift-diffusion model

Abstract

Face masks slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but it has been unknown whether masks influence how individuals communicate emotion through facial expressions. Masks could influence how accurately—or how quickly—individuals perceive expressions, and how rapidly they accumulate evidence for emotion. Over two independent pre-registered studies, conducted three and six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, participants judged expressions of 6 emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) with the lower or upper face “masked” or unmasked. Participants in Study 1 (N = 228) identified expressions above chance with lower face masks. However, they were less likely—and slower—to correctly identify these expressions versus without masks, and they accumulated evidence for emotion more slowly—via decreased drift rate in drift-diffusion modeling. This pattern replicated and intensified three months later in Study 2 (N = 264). These data could inform interventions to promote mask wearing by addressing concerns with emotion communication.

Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions

“…When protagonists wore masks they were judged as feeling more neutral and less intense emotion. This finding dovetails with recent work from both emotion recognition (Carbon, 2020;Grundmann et al, 2021;Carbon and Serrano, 2021;Williams et al, 2021;Grenville and Dwyer, 2022;Kim et al, 2022;McCrackin et al, 2022a) and emotional valence and intensity paradigms (McCrackin et al, 2022b) to suggest that face occlusion by masks significantly impacts not only basic emotion recognition but also judgments of emotional states that integrate both emotional expressions and contextual information.…”

“…Lower face occlusion with face masks has been shown to impair our ability to recognize facial emotional expressions (Carbon, 2020;Grundmann et al, 2021;Carbon and Serrano, 2021;Williams et al, 2021;Grenville and Dwyer, 2022;Kim et al, 2022;McCrackin et al, 2022a), prompting concerns about the effectiveness of social interactions in masked situations (Mheidly et al, 2020;Molnar-Szakacs et al, 2021). However, during real life social interactions, emotional expressions are typically experienced within a broader emotional context that might compensate for the lack of lower face cues (Wieser and Brosch, 2012).…”

“…It is thus unsurprising that face masks have been shown to impact many of these judgments, including reducing perceived closeness (Grundmann et al, 2021), increasing perceived attractiveness (Hies and Lewis, 2022;Parada-Fernández et al, 2022) and either increasing (Cartaud et al, 2020; but see Grundmann et al, 2021) or decreasing (Biermann et al, 2021;Gabrieli and Esposito, 2021) perceived trustworthiness. The alterations in such secondorder trait perception likely stem from the obstruction of the visual information from the lower face cues needed for basic processes that inform these judgments, such as emotion recognition (Carbon, 2020;Grundmann et al, 2021;Carbon and Serrano, 2021;Williams et al, 2021;Grenville and Dwyer, 2022;Kim et al, 2022;McCrackin et al, 2022a;Parada-Fernández et al, 2022). Indeed, emotion recognition performance for faces obstructed by face masks can decline from 10 to 45% depending on the emotional expression (Carbon, 2020;McCrackin et al, 2022a).…”

“…Indeed, emotion recognition performance for faces obstructed by face masks can decline from 10 to 45% depending on the emotional expression (Carbon, 2020;McCrackin et al, 2022a). That is, recognition of emotional expressions thought to have particularly diagnostic lower face features like disgust and anger (e.g., Ekman, 1999;Smith et al, 2005;Blais et al, 2012;Kret and de Gelder, 2012;Wegrzyn et al, 2017) is the most impacted by lower face occlusion while recognition of expressions with diagnostic upper face regions like fear and surprise is least impacted by lower face occlusion (Carbon, 2020;Carbon and Serrano, 2021;Williams et al, 2021;Grenville and Dwyer, 2022;Kim et al, 2022;McCrackin et al, 2022a).…”

“…While the impact of masks on basic emotion recognition is clear (Carbon, 2020;Grundmann et al, 2021;Carbon and Serrano, 2021;Williams et al, 2021;Grenville and Dwyer, 2022;Kim et al, 2022;McCrackin et al, 2022a), recognition of emotional expressions is typically situated within a broader emotional context (Wieser and Brosch, 2012). For example, one might perceive a smile alongside a joke being told or hearing good news being shared.…”