Frequent experience with face coverings for 10 months improves emotion perception among individuals with high autistic traits: A repeated cross-sectional study.

Abstract

Face coverings pose difficulties for emotion recognition, but it is unclear whether improvement in recognising emotions from the eyes is possible with experience and whether this might be dependent on one's autistic traits, given the associations between high autistic traits and poorer emotion perception and reduced gaze to the eye region. In this preregistered study, participants completed a forced-choice emotion recognition task with photographs of eyes and demographic questionnaires that measure their autistic traits and their interaction frequency with others wearing face coverings at two time points: once at the start of the face covering mandate and again 10 months later. We found that after 10 months, individuals with high autistic traits as a cohort recognised emotions from just the eyes better as a function of their experience with others wearing face coverings, suggesting that emotion perception is malleable even for those who have difficulties with emotion perception.