Abstract
Younger adults have difficulties identifying emotional facial expressions from faces covered by face masks. It is important to evaluate how face mask wearing might specifically impact older people, because they have lower emotion identification performance than younger adults, even without face masks. We compared performance of 62young and 38older adults in an online task of emotional facial expression identification using masked or unmasked pictures of faces with fear, happiness, anger, surprise, and neutral expression, from different viewpoints. Face masks affected performance in both age groups, but more so in older adults, specifically for negative emotions (anger, fear), in favour of the saliency hypothesis as an explanation for the positive advantage. Additionally, face masks more affected emotion recognition on profile than on three-quarter or full-face views. Our results encourage using clearer and full-face expressions when dealing with older people while wearing face masks.
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