Transparent masks reduce the negative impact of opaque masks on understanding emotional states but not on sharing them

Abstract

While face masks provide necessary protection against disease spread, they occlude the lower face parts (chin, mouth, nose) and consequently impair the ability to accurately perceive facial emotions. Here we examined how wearing face masks impacted making inferences about emotional states of others (i.e., affective theory of mind; Experiment 1) and sharing of emotions with others (i.e., affective empathy; Experiment 2). We also investigated whether wearing transparent masks ameliorated the occlusion impact of opaque masks. Participants viewed emotional faces presented within matching positive (happy), negative (sad), or neutral contexts. The faces wore opaque masks, transparent masks, or no masks. In Experiment 1, participants rated the protagonists’ emotional valence and intensity. In Experiment 2, they indicated their empathy for the protagonist and the valence of their emotion. Wearing opaque masks impacted both affective theory of mind and affective empathy ratings. Compared to no masks, wearing opaque masks resulted in assumptions that the protagonist was feeling less intense and more neutral emotions. Wearing opaque masks also reduced positive empathy for the protagonist and resulted in more neutral shared valence ratings. Wearing transparent masks restored the affective theory of mind ratings but did not restore empathy ratings. Thus, wearing face masks impairs nonverbal social communication, with transparent masks able to restore some of the negative effects brought about by opaque masks. Implications for the theoretical understanding of socioemotional processing as well as for educational and professional settings are discussed.

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

“…Following from past work (e.g., McCrackin et al, 2022b), we expected to observe diminished (i.e., more neutral) ratings of the protagonists' emotions when they wore masks. However, if this negative effect of facial obstruction was modulated by the availability of emotional context, we expected to find higher emotional ratings for faces wearing masks in conditions in which congruent context was provided relative to conditions in which no context was provided.…”

“…Seventy undergraduate students participated for course credit and were included in the analysis (66 female, 3 male, 1 other; Mean age: 20.41, SE = 0.13). 2 Sample size was preregistered and determined with a conservative power analysis based on our previous work with face masks and emotion recognition (McCrackin et al, 2022a) and affective theory of mind (McCrackin et al, 2022b). Participants provided informed consent and the McGill University research ethics board approved the study.…”

“…5 The following sentence themes were selected from the list of 25 starred themes in McCrackin and Itier (2021, Table 1), with Theme 1 referencing the first starred sentence: Theme 13, Theme 14, Theme 15, Theme 16, Theme 17, Theme 18, Theme 20, Theme 21, Theme 22, Theme 23, Theme 24, Theme 25. (McCrackin and Itier, 2021;McCrackin et al, 2022b). In the No Context condition, the sentence "Get ready for the next person to appear" was displayed.…”

“…Figure 1B illustrates a typical trial. Participants were first shown either an emotional context sentence (Context condition) or a neutral sentence (No Context condition) for 4,000 ms. A 200 ms fixation cross preceded a presentation of the Happy or Sad emotional face either wearing a mask (Mask) or not wearing a mask (No Mask) for 2,000 ms. After the image presentation, participants were asked to use a 9-point Likert scale to rate the protagonists' (i) emotional intensity ranging from 0/very un-intense to 9/very intense, and (ii) emotional valence from 6 We had examined how a neutral emotion condition (using both neutral sentences and facial expression) influences affective judgments in our recent work assessing how face covering with opaque vs. transparent face masks impacted affective theory of mind and empathy ratings (McCrackin et al, 2022b). In this study, we observed that the neutral emotion condition generated data which fell in between happy and sad conditions (as it would be expected), with ratings close a perfect neutral score of 5 on the Likert scale when faces were covered by a transparent mask.…”

Correction: Transparent masks reduce the negative impact of opaque masks on understanding emotional states but not on sharing them

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The original article (McCrackin et al 2022) contained an error in attribution of equal contribution in the authorship. This has since been corrected to show Sabrina Provencher and Ethan Mendell as the correct equal contributors.

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