Investigating the impact of disposable surgical face‐masks on face identity and emotion recognition in adults with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

With the outburst of the COVID‐19 pandemic, disposable surgical face‐masks (DSFMs) have been widely adopted as a preventive measure. DSFMs hide the bottom half of the face, thus making identity and emotion recognition very challenging, both in typical and atypical populations. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are often characterized by face processing deficits; thus, DSFMs could pose even a greater challenge for this population compared to typically development (TD) individuals. In this study, 48 ASDs of level 1 and 110 TDs underwent two tasks: (i) the Old‐new face memory task, which assesses whether DSFMs affect face learning and recognition, and (ii) the Facial affect task, which explores DSFMs' effect on emotion recognition. Results from the former show that, when faces were learned without DSFMs, identity recognition of masked faces decreased for both ASDs and TDs. In contrast, when faces were first learned with DSFMs, TDs but not ASDs benefited from a “context congruence” effect, that is, faces wearing DSFMs were better recognized if learned wearing DSFMs. In addition, results from the Facial affect task show that DSFMs negatively impacted specific emotion recognition in both TDs and ASDs, although differentially between the two groups. DSFMs negatively affected disgust, happiness and sadness recognition in TDs; in contrast, ASDs performance decreased for every emotion except anger. Overall, our study demonstrates a general, although different, disruptive effect on identity and emotion recognition both in ASD and TD population.

Normative data of the Italian Famous Face Test

“…Our first aim was to equip clinicians with a reliable tool designed to assess face recognition on the Italian population, providing robust normative data. Notably, face recognition deficits may appear as primary features in conditions such as congenital prosopagnosia 27 , or as a critical symptom in conditions such as autism and other neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric conditions 21 , 48 . Rizzo et al published the first normative data for an Italian famous face test in 2002 15 .…”

From personification abuse to normal expression: emotional treatment for language disorders in schools

“…To address this issue, future research could benefit from adopting a mixed-methods approach. Moreover, the assessment of severe autism was confined to official records of autism, and more robust conclusions could have been drawn if selfreport data or alternative information sources were included (35,39). Nevertheless, despite these limitations, the study makes a significant contribution to the literature on autism assessment for emotionally-involved children with autism by utilizing a substantial sample size and encompassing all children with autism who underwent emotional treatment at a single psychiatric facility.…”

Exploring the Impact of Partial Occlusion on Emotion Classification From Facial Expressions: A Comparative Study of XR Headsets and Face Masks

“…The second scenario is the use of face masks, which increased globally during the COVID-19 pandemic [24,25,26]. The use of face masks has been demonstrated to affect emotion recognition in humans [27,28,29], specially in individuals with conditions like autism spectrum disorder [30,31,32], as well as to affect performance on facial expression classification algorithms [27].…”