Masking Emotions: Face Masks Impair How We Read Emotions

"To date, COVID-19 has spread across the world, changing our way of life and forcing us to wear face masks. This report demonstrates that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial configurations. Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old. These findings are of essential importance, as they suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotion reasoning, and young children’s future social abilities should be monitored to assess the true impact of the use of masks...

Conclusion

To conclude, here, we showed that mask use influences our ability to infer facial expressions at any age. Furthermore, we showed that the human capacity to read emotions from facial configurations when a face mask is present becomes particularly reduced in toddlers. We suggested that this is related to different age-related developmental stages of face processing associated with emotional reasoning. Such observation poses the question whether a privation of facial visual features, as the one we are experiencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, might alter or delay the development of social skills associated with face perception in early childhood."