Since the onset of the worldwide pandemic, face masks have been widely adopted to control the spread of COVID-19. While masks are critical for mitigating disease contagion, they hide parts of our faces which are used for nonverbal communication to express our emotions and intentions.

A team of researchers from the Laboratory for Attention and Social Cognition at McGill University compared how over 120 individuals recognize emotions: happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, surprised, and neutral facial expressions in masked and unmasked faces. Not surprisingly, they found that face masks reduced the ability to recognize facial expressions for all emotions. Thus, obscuring face parts alters human social communication. The research was published in Social Psychology.

Q&A with Jelena Ristic, Full Professor and William Dawson Scholar and Sarah McCrackin, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology

What question(s) did you set out to answer?

Humans have evolved to communicate via the silent language of faces. As a result, we are able to read a number of simple (e.g., eye gaze) and complex (e.g., intentions) social messages from faces alone. One of the most important cues we receive from faces is facial expression, which signals the individual's emotional state.

With the sudden and widespread adoption of face masks in 2020 to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, we set out to investigate how covering the lower part of the face with a mask impacted our ability to recognize basic emotions from facial expressions. We also wanted to assess if this behavior varied with individual participants' personality traits and their level of social ability.

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-masks-impair-nonverbal-individuals.html