What influence do face masks have on reading emotions in faces?

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Social Science

Background:

• The SARS-COVID-2 pandemic significantly impacted global social life, necessitating widespread use of medical face masks.
• Face masks obscure key facial features like the mouth and nose, potentially hindering the perception of emotional expressions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of face masks on the recognition of emotional facial expressions.
• To examine changes in brain activity during emotion recognition while wearing face masks.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was employed.
• 16 healthy volunteers viewed short video clips of evolving emotional face expressions.
• Brain activity was measured during emotion recognition tasks with and without face masks.

Main Results:

• Face masks significantly delayed the recognition of emotions.
• Emotion recognition accuracy remained high (nearly 100%) despite the delay.
• A decrease in cortical network activation, crucial for face recognition, was observed.

Conclusions:

• Face masks can adversely affect social interactions by impairing affect reading.
• The findings highlight the role of unobstructed facial cues in effective social communication.
• Further research is warranted to explore long-term social and psychological consequences.