Abstract
Facial emotion recognition is crucial for social interaction. However, in times of a global pandemic, where wearing a face mask covering mouth and nose is widely encouraged to prevent the spread of disease, successful emotion recognition may be challenging. In the current study, we investigated whether emotion recognition, assessed by a validated emotion recognition task, is impaired for faces wearing a mask compared to uncovered faces, in a sample of 790 participants between 18 and 89 years (condition mask vs. original). In two more samples of 395 and 388 participants between 18 and 70 years, we assessed emotion recognition performance for faces that are occluded by something other than a mask, i.e., a bubble as well as only showing the upper part of the faces (condition half vs. bubble). Additionally, perception of threat for faces with and without occlusion was assessed. We found impaired emotion recognition for faces wearing a mask compared to faces without mask, for all emotions tested (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, neutral). Further, we observed that perception of threat was altered for faces wearing a mask. Upon comparison of the different types of occlusion, we found that, for most emotions and especially for disgust, there seems to be an effect that can be ascribed to the face mask specifically, both for emotion recognition performance and perception of threat. Methodological constraints as well as the importance of wearing a mask despite temporarily compromised social interaction are discussed.
Highlights
The congenital and cross-cultural ability to recognise facial emotional expressions is considered a prerequisite for successful social interaction [1]
In a control condition consisting of two parallel versions, we further investigated whether emotion recognition performance for faces covered by a face mask differs from recognition performance for faces where only the upper half is presented and for faces where a bubble occludes the lower facial regions
Emotion recognition and perception of threat recognition affected by face masks without control conditions [e.g. 35], we were able to report a specific effect of a certain kind of occlusion, namely the face mask, especially for disgust
Summary
The congenital and cross-cultural ability to recognise facial emotional expressions is considered a prerequisite for successful social interaction [1]. In times of a global pandemic, people are widely encouraged to wear face masks covering mouth and nose in order to minimise risk of infection.
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