Facial masks affect emotion recognition in the general population and individuals with autistic traits

Abstract

Facial expressions, and the ability to recognize these expressions, have evolved in humans to communicate information to one another. Face masks are equipment used in healthcare by health professionals to prevent the transmission of airborne infections. As part of the social distancing efforts related to COVID-19, wearing facial masks has been practiced globally. Such practice might influence affective information communication among humans. Previous research suggests that masks disrupt expression recognition of some emotions (e.g., fear, sadness or neutrality) and lower the confidence in their identification. To extend the previous research, in the current study we tested a larger and more diverse sample of individuals and also investigated the effect of masks on perceived intensity of expressions. Moreover, for the first time in the literature we examined these questions using individuals with autistic traits. Specifically, across three experiments using different populations (college students and general population), and the 10-item Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ-10; lower and higher scorers), we tested the effect of facial masks on facial emotion recognition of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutrality. Results showed that the ability to identify all facial expressions decreased when faces were masked, a finding observed across all three studies, contradicting previous research on fear, sad, and neutral expressions. Participants were also less confident in their judgements for all emotions, supporting previous research; and participants perceived emotions as less expressive in the mask condition compared to the unmasked condition, a finding novel to the literature. An additional novel finding was that participants with higher scores on the AQ-10 were less accurate and less confident overall in facial expression recognition, as well as perceiving expressions as less intense. Our findings reveal that wearing face masks decreases facial expression recognition, confidence in expression identification, as well as the perception of intensity for all expressions, affecting high-scoring AQ-10 individuals more than low-scoring individuals.

Face masks have emotion-dependent dissociable effects on accuracy and confidence in identifying facial expressions of emotion

“…Bassili, 1979;Roberson et al, 2012) and so the natural presumption is that face mask wearing will also impair emotion recognition. Indeed, several recent studies have demonstrated exactly this effect (Carbon, 2020;Gori et al, 2021;Gulbetekin, 2021;Noyes et al, 2021;Pazhoohi et al, 2021). However, one potentially problematic feature of all these studies is that they deployed stimuli that were created by using image processing software to artificially impose a face mask, rather than use images of people expressing emotions while actually wearing a mask.…”

“…While all studies of mask wearing effects on facial emotion recognition report generally deleterious effects of the mask on accuracy of recognition, the effects were not consistent across emotions. Gulbetekin (2021) and Pazhoohi et al (2021) reported a reduction in accuracy for all emotions tested (although with different effect sizes across emotions); Carbon (2020) reported recognition deficits for angry, disgusted, happy, and sad, but not for fearful or neutral expressions; and Noyes et al (2021) reported deficits for angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, and surprised, but not for sad or neutral expressions. Firstly, the fact that the effect of covering the mouth and lower face with masks differs across emotions is consistent with studies, using the "bubbles" (Gosselin & Schyns, 2001) or related methods, which suggest the most diagnostic areas of the face differ across emotions (e.g.…”

“…In addition, only two of the previous studies of the effects of mask wearing on emotion recognition (Carbon, 2020;Pazhoohi et al, 2021) collected data on the confidence of the observers. In both studies, confidence was lower for all expressions when masks were present.…”

Masked Emotions: Do Face Mask Patterns and Colors Affect the Recognition of Emotions?

“…It is possible that the selective impairment in processing masked emotions may be related to certain individual differences. As some literature suggests, reading emotions from isolated face regions may be specifically impaired in some populations (e.g., autistic - Baron-Cohen et al 1997b;Pazhoohi et al, 2021;Ramachandra & Longacre, 2022). Possibly, occluding mouth regions may be disadvantageous for individuals with specific traits.…”

“…Besides, people with difficulties in emotional processing such as those with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome were found to have impaired emotion recognition from the eyes alone more than other populations , Wheelwright, & Jolliffe , 1997b). More recent studies showed that higher degree of autistic traits predicted a greater difficulty in recognizing emotions both with and without masks (Pazhoohi et al, 2021;Ramachandra & Longacre, 2022). Anxiety was also found to be related to altered emotional recognition, so that individuals with high-trait anxiety were shown to identify fear significantly better.…”