Wearing Face Masks Strongly Confuses Counterparts in Reading Emotions.

Claus-Christian Carbon

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.566886

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.

Highlights

Wearing face masks1 is recommended in many scenarios, mostly in clinical contexts, when infected by certain respiratory diseases or in times of epidemics where the risk of potential transmission through air passages has to be reduced (Jefferson et al, 2008)
Overall performance for correctly identifying facial emotions in faces without masks was quite remarkable, M = 89.5% with no participant performing below an overall rate of 76.4%; this high recognition rate outperforms the accuracy of assigning emotional states to faces documented by many other studies
We tested the effect of wearing masks on the performance of emotional reading in faces by means of linear mixed models (LMMs) with face mask as a fixed factor against a base model which only contained the participants and base stimuli as random intercepts and face emotion as fixed slopes – FS

Summary

Introduction

Wearing face masks is recommended in many scenarios, mostly in clinical contexts, when infected by certain respiratory diseases or in times of epidemics where the risk of potential transmission through air passages has to be reduced (Jefferson et al, 2008). Congenital prosopagnosia shows a high prevalence rate of about 2.5% (Grüter et al, 2008), we rarely encounter a person who explicitly shows this inability in real-life – the reason for this is that many of the affected persons have developed coping strategies They compensate for the impaired capability of reading facial identification cues by means of using different sources of information such as the characteristic gait or gesture, or by using information from other modalities, such as the characteristic voice pattern of a person. The affected persons are susceptible to losing a part of the multichannel-multisensory integration possibilities to crosscheck and validate their assessments Some of these signals that faces provide are processed very fast (identity, Carbon, 2011; gender and attractiveness, Carbon et al, 2018; emotion, Willis and Todorov, 2006), the validity of the final assessments is under great dispute (Russell, 1994; Rojahn et al, 2000)

Methods

Results

Conclusion