Abstract
To date, COVID-19 has spread across the world, changing our way of life and forcing us to wear face masks. This report demonstrates that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial configurations. Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old. These findings are of essential importance, as they suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotion reasoning, and young children’s future social abilities should be monitored to assess the true impact of the use of masks.
Highlights
Understanding emotions is crucial for social interaction
Infants can discriminate facial movements expressing surprise from those associated with happiness and sadness, and they can discriminate between different emotion intensities
Here, we showed that mask use influences our ability to infer facial expressions at any age
Summary
Understanding emotions is crucial for social interaction. Interpreting other people’s facial configurations is fundamental during social development when children learn to interact with others (Denham et al, 2014). The first ability to discriminate facial configurations associated with emotional states develops early in infancy. Children within the first months of life begin to understand positive and negative emotions (Walker-Andrews, 1997; Grossmann, 2010). At 4 months of age, infants begin to discriminate facial movements associated with anger and happiness emotions (Barrera and Maurer, 1981). Within the second year of life, children develop more abstract concepts of emotion, like understanding the congruence of other people’s facial movements and actions (Hepach and Westermann, 2013)
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