Wearing Face Masks Strongly Confuses Counterparts in Reading Emotions

Abstract

Wearing face masks is one of the essential means to prevent the transmission of certain respiratory diseases such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Although acceptance of such masks is increasing in the Western hemisphere, many people feel that social interaction is affected by wearing a mask. In the present experiment, we tested the impact of face masks on the readability of emotions. The participants (N = 41, calculated by an a priori power test; random sample; healthy persons of different ages, 18-87 years) assessed the emotional expressions displayed by 12 different faces. Each face was randomly presented with six different expressions (angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, neutral, and sad) while being fully visible or partly covered by a face mask. Lower accuracy and lower confidence in one's own assessment of the displayed emotions indicate that emotional reading was strongly irritated by the presence of a mask. We further detected specific confusion patterns, mostly pronounced in the case of misinterpreting disgusted faces as being angry plus assessing many other emotions (e.g., happy, sad, and angry) as neutral. We discuss compensatory actions that can keep social interaction effective (e.g., body language, gesture, and verbal communication), even when relevant visual information is crucially reduced.

Face masks reduce emotion-recognition accuracy and perceived closeness

“…To better understand their collateral psychological consequences, we investigated face masks' effect on emotional and social inferences. Emotion-recognition accuracy declined for masked (vs. unmasked) faces (see also Carbon, 2020). Moreover, we linked lower accuracy to being male (vs. female), being old (vs. young), seeing an old (vs. young) target face, and to seeing a negative (vs. non-negative) emotional expression (e.g., Fölster et al, 2014;Ruffman et al, 2008).…”

“…As face masks reduce facial cues by covering the mouth and part of the nose, they may undermine people's ability to correctly recognize emotional expressions. Indeed, adult participants exhibited lower accuracy rates for faces whose mouth regions was covered (vs. not;Carbon, 2020). Therefore, we expected that wearing a face mask (vs. not) negatively impacts emotion-recognition accuracy (H1).…”

“…Extending earlier work (Carbon, 2020), we assessed face masks' effect on social judgments. Wearing a face mask (vs. not) did not affect perceived trustworthiness, likability, and closeness.…”

Wearing a face mask against Covid-19 results in a reduction of social distancing

“…They were presented in an empty room with an angry, happy or neutral facial expression, or with a white face mask. When the virtual character had a face mask, the facial emotion was neutral so as to avoid confounding factors [23]. Both the characters and the empty room were built on Unity (2018.2.21f1 version).…”

I see how you feel: facial expressions’ recognition and distancing in the time of COVID-19

“…As expected, these results showed that when only the upper part of the face is visible (i.e., the eyes), participants perceive and recognize negative emotions (i.e., anger and fear) better than positive (i.e., happiness) ones. Furthermore, some studies also demonstrated that Islamic contextual cues bias perception toward more intense negative emotions 9,10 . In the last months, many scholars have addressed the social and emotional consequences of COVID-19 on people's well-being [11][12][13] , but very few have considered the social negative consequences of wearing a sanitary face mask [14][15][16] . Indeed, the presence of the sanitary mask may in uence not only the recognition and comprehension of others' emotions, but, given its current status as a contextual cue of the pandemic, also the attribution of physical and social distance.…”