Do face masks affect emotion recognition?

What is it about?

Is it more difficult to recognise emotions in masked faces compared to faces without a mask? We found that emotion recognition is less accurate for the emotions anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust and even neutral faces wearing a mask. We also looked at whether masked faces are perceived as more threatening than unmasked faces and found that masked faces are indeed perceived differently.

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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Facial emotion recognition is very important for social interaction. However, in times of a global pandemic, where wearing a face mask covering mouth and nose is encouraged to prevent the spread of disease, successful emotion recognition may be difficult and lead to problems in social interaction.