Surgical face masks do not impair the decoding of facial expressions of negative affect more severely in older than in younger adults

Abstract

Surgical face masks reduce the spread of airborne pathogens but also disturb the flow of information between individuals. The risk of getting seriously ill after infection with SARS-COV-2 during the present COVID-19 pandemic amplifies with age, suggesting that face masks should be worn especially during face-to-face contact with and between older people. However, the ability to accurately perceive and understand communication signals decreases with age, and it is currently unknown whether face masks impair facial communication more severely in older people. We compared the impact of surgical face masks on dynamic facial emotion recognition in younger (18–30 years) and older (65–85 years) adults (N = 96) in an online study. Participants watched short video clips of young women who facially expressed anger, fear, contempt or sadness. Faces of half of the women were covered by a digitally added surgical face mask. As expected, emotion recognition accuracy declined with age, and face masks reduced emotion recognition accuracy in both younger and older participants. Unexpectedly, the effect of face masks did not differ between age groups. Further analyses showed that masks also reduced the participants’ overall confidence in their emotion judgements, but not their performance awareness (the difference between their confidence ratings for correct and incorrect responses). Again, there were no mask-by-age interactions. Finally, data obtained with a newly developed questionnaire (attitudes towards face masks, atom) suggest that younger and older people do not differ in how much they feel impaired in their understanding of other people’s emotions by face masks or how useful they find face masks in confining the COVID-19 pandemic. In sum, these findings do not provide evidence that the impact of face masks on the decoding of facial signals is disproportionally larger in older people.

Face coverings: Considering the implications for face perception and speech communication

“…Here, they concluded that participants were likely to confuse emotions that share activation of the visible muscles in the upper half of the face. Using dynamic face stimuli, Henke et al ( 2022 ) also found that face masks reduced emotion recognition accuracy and confidence in both younger and older participants. A few papers looked at other aspects of faces including gender decisions (Wong & Estudillo, 2022 ) and face attractiveness (Hies & Lewis, 2022 ; Pazhoohi et al, 2022 ).…”

Do masks cover more than just a face? A study on how facemasks affect the perception of emotional expressions according to their degree of intensity

“…They could also use more ecological stimuli, such as faces presented in natural environments of persons of different ethnicities, ages, and genders. In this vein, some studies used dynamic expression changes (Henke et al, 2022; Kleiser et al, 2022; Langbehn et al, 2022; Leitner et al, 2022), videos of people in two different environmental contexts (Kastendieck et al, 2022), or expressive faces combined with other types of stimuli, such as voice recordings (Aguillon-Hernandez et al, 2022; Cohn et al, 2021) or pictures of the whole body (Ross & George, 2022). Most of these studies observed an impact of facemasks on facial expression recognition (Aguillon-Hernandez et al, 2022; Cohn et al, 2021; Henke et al, 2022; Kastendieck et al, 2022; Kleiser et al, 2022; Leitner et al, 2022).…”

“…In this vein, some studies used dynamic expression changes (Henke et al, 2022; Kleiser et al, 2022; Langbehn et al, 2022; Leitner et al, 2022), videos of people in two different environmental contexts (Kastendieck et al, 2022), or expressive faces combined with other types of stimuli, such as voice recordings (Aguillon-Hernandez et al, 2022; Cohn et al, 2021) or pictures of the whole body (Ross & George, 2022). Most of these studies observed an impact of facemasks on facial expression recognition (Aguillon-Hernandez et al, 2022; Cohn et al, 2021; Henke et al, 2022; Kastendieck et al, 2022; Kleiser et al, 2022; Leitner et al, 2022). Nevertheless, this impact would be less consequent when the whole body is visible (Ross & George, 2022), thus suggesting that body language might be a useful strategy to compensate the effect of facemasks.…”

El rol de la expresión facial en el procesamiento de emociones: Una revisión sistemática

“…El uso de máscaras faciales confunde fuertemente a sus Los estudios analizados sobre el impacto de la mascarilla facial en el reconocimiento de emociones, entre los cuales han llegado a una conclusión similar, fue que el uso de mascarillas efectivamente influye en la valencia, intensidad, expresión y reconocimiento de emociones, viéndose reducida esta capacidad de identificación facial (Carbon, 2020;Kim et al, 2022;Miyazaki et al, 2022;Cooper et al, 2022;Grenville & Dwyer, 2022, Levitan et al, 2022Henke et al, 2022;Maiorana et al, 2022;Pavlova et al, 2023;Leos-Mendoza et al, 2023), no obstante, se observaron diferencias en los aportes de cada investigación. Algunos estudios señalaron que las emociones y expresiones faciales asociadas se ven influidas por el uso de cubrebocas, por ejemplo, emociones como disgusto, tristeza y felicidad (Cooper et al, 2022;Kastendieck et al, 2023;Aguillón-Hernández et al, 2022) no son procesadas correctamente por la correspondencia a la expresividad de la boca y nariz, mientras que en emociones como la ira y el miedo la influencia de su uso, no alteró el reconocimiento (Carbon, 2020;Grenville & Dwyer, 2022;Proverbio et al, 2023) debido a la información ubicada en la región de los ojos y las cejas para su procesamiento (Proverbio & Cerri, 2022).…”