Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing

Abstract

Faces are one of the key ways that we obtain social information about others. They allow people to identify individuals, understand conversational cues, and make judgements about other’s mental states. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, widespread mask-wearing practices were implemented, causing a shift in the way Americans typically interact. This introduction of masks into social exchanges posed a potential challenge – how would people make these important inferences about others when a large source of information was no longer available? We conducted two studies that investigated the impact of mask exposure on emotion perception. In particular, we measured how participants used facial landmarks (visual cues) and the expressed valence and arousal (affective cues), to make similarity judgements about pairs of emotion faces. Study 1 found that participants with higher levels of mask exposure used cues from the eyes to a greater extent when judging emotion similarity than participants with less mask exposure. Study 2 measured participants’ emotion perception in both April and September 2020 – before and after widespread mask adoption – in the same group of participants to examine changes in the use of facial cues over time. Results revealed an overall increase in the use of visual cues from April to September. Further, as mask exposure increased, people with the most social interaction showed the largest increase in the use of visual facial cues. These results provide evidence that a shift has occurred in how people process faces such that the more people are interacting with others that are wearing masks, the more they have learned to focus on visual cues from the eye area of the face.

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

“…Similarly, previous studies showed that individual differences in mask exposure influenced the use of visual cues from the face. A longitudinal study (two controlled experiments with 6 months apart) assessed the perceived emotional similarity between a pair of unmasked faces (Barrick et al, 2020). As mask exposure increases, there is an increase in the eye cue use.…”

“…An examination of eye movements showed that while Western individuals' eye fixations were scattered evenly across the faces, Eastern individuals mainly focused on the eyes (Jack et al, 2009). In addition, there is research that demonstrates that as individuals' exposure to masks increases, they actually get better at reading emotions (Barrick et al, 2020). Hence, timing of execution of these studies may matter.…”

The effects of spatial frequency on the decoding of emotional facial expressions

“…Thus, when encountering a facial expression of forward facing, direct eye-gaze fear, the typically encountered signature of that expression is less cogent, leading to diminished detection accuracy (Adams & Kleck, 2003;Im et al, 2017;Sato et al, 2004). The effects of introducing noise to facial expression decoding can also be seen in recent research that suggests wearing a mask (hiding signal from the mouth) diminishes individuals' reliance on arousal cues (Barrick et al, 2020). Future research should investigate how obfuscation of face parts, gaze and head positioning influence accuracy of emotional expression identification when only low or high spatial frequency information is available.…”

The face behind the mask: The future of interpersonal interaction

“…Some emotional expressions including happy, sad, and angry are sometimes not perceived at all under a mask, with the face being interpreted instead as neutral ( Carbon, 2020 ). However, consistently engaging in social interaction with masked individuals is already leading to behavioral adaptation in Americans, with those who have more frequent masked interactions increasingly using cues for visual emotion information from the eyes ( Barrick et al., 2020 ).…”