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 others’ 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 in August 2020, 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.

“What Is Hidden behind the Mask?” Facial Emotion Recognition at the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic in Cognitively Normal Multiple Sclerosis Patients

“…These are considered crucial areas for facial emotion recognition, mainly disgust and happiness [ 19 ]; therefore, the use of masks may lead to inaccurate face processing which can crucially affect social everyday interactions [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. Detailed processing of human faces is already more difficult with partial occlusions commonly used in everyday life (i.e., sunglasses, scarfs, headdresses, veils) [ 24 , 25 , 26 ]; consequently, it might be even more altered when people wear masks that cover between 60% and 70% of the entire face, depending on shapes and sizes [ 27 ], forcing people to ground the emotion identification mainly on cues from the eyes [ 28 ]. Some studies have been conducted in healthy controls on this topic since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the lower accuracy in the emotion recognition of faces wearing masks [ 27 , 29 , 30 , 31 ].…”

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.…”

Communicating and reading emotion with masked faces in the Covid era: A short review of the literature

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