Face Masks Impair Basic Emotion Recognition: Group Effects and Individual Variability

With the widespread adoption of masks, there is a need for understanding how facial obstruction affects emotion recognition. We asked 120 participants to identify emotions from faces with and without masks. We also examined if recognition performance was related to autistic traits and personality. M...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social psychology (Göttingen, Germany) Germany), 2023, Vol.54 (1-2), p.4-15
Main Authors: McCrackin, Sarah D., Capozzi, Francesca, Mayrand, Florence, Ristic, Jelena
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agreeableness
Autism
Autistic Traits
Emotion Recognition
Emotions
Extraversion
Facial Features
Female
Group Dynamics
Human
Male
Personality Traits
Social Skills
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Summary:With the widespread adoption of masks, there is a need for understanding how facial obstruction affects emotion recognition. We asked 120 participants to identify emotions from faces with and without masks. We also examined if recognition performance was related to autistic traits and personality. Masks impacted recognition of expressions with diagnostic lower face features the most and those with diagnostic upper face features the least. Persons with higher autistic traits were worse at identifying unmasked expressions, while persons with lower extraversion and higher agreeableness were better at recognizing masked expressions. These results show that different features play different roles in emotion recognition and suggest that obscuring features affects social communication differently as a function of autistic traits and personality.
ISSN:1864-9335
2151-2590
DOI:10.1027/1864-9335/a000470