ArticlePloS one2020
Children's emotion inferences from masked faces: Implications for social interactions during COVID-19.
Article in PloS one, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 72 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
72 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 140 citations in OpenAlex.
- Child mask mandates for COVID-19: a systematic review.Archives of disease in childhood · 2024Pooled it
- Emotion regulation as mediator between childhood adversity and psychopathology: A meta-analysis.Clinical psychology review · 2022Pooled it
- [Impact of wearing face masks in public to prevent infectious diseases on the psychosocial development in children and adolescents: a systematic review].Bundesgesundheitsblatt, Gesundheitsforschung, Gesundheitsschutz · 2021Pooled it
- Conceptual priors drive development of predictive attention to emotion.Child development · 2026Article
- Effects of affective vs. instructional teacher scaffolding on preschoolers' emotional engagement and social attention in picturebook reading.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The development of cognitive and affective empathy from ages 3 to 20: a new experimental task.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Body Knowledge and Emotion Recognition in Preschool Children: A Comparative Study of Human Versus Robot Tutors.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Limited Effect of Masking During COVID-19 Pandemic on ADOS-2 Algorithm Scores in Toddlers With and Without Autism.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2025Article
- The Development of Emotion Recognition Skills from Childhood to Adolescence.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2025Article
- Seeing emotions: an eye-tracking study of emotion recognition in deaf individuals amid facial occlusions.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Full and Partial Facial Affect Recognition in Pediatric Brain Tumour Survivors and Typically Developing Children Following COVID-19 Pandemic.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2024Article
- Three years of COVID-19-related school restrictions and mental health of children and adolescents in Japan.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- In masks we trust: explicit and implicit reactions to masked faces vary by political orientation.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- On the brain struggles to recognize basic facial emotions with face masks: an fMRI study.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Lesson learned from the COVID-19 pandemic: toddlers learn earlier to read emotions with face masks.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Masked emotions: does children's affective state influence emotion recognition?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Patients and general practitioners agree that wearing masks during consultations complicates physician--patient relationships: An exploratory, qualitative study.The European journal of general practice · 2023Article
- Autistic traits modulate the influence of face masks on gaze perception.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Influence of child and adult faces with face masks on emotion perception and facial mimicry.Scientific reports · 2023Article
12 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
To slow the progression of COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have recommended wearing face coverings. However, very little is known about how occluding parts of the face might impact the emotion inferences that children make during social interactions. The current study recruited a racially diverse sample of school-aged (7- to 13-years) children from publicly funded after-school programs. Children made inferences from facial configurations that were not covered, wearing sunglasses to occlude the eyes, or wearing surgical masks to occlude the mouth. Children were still able to make accurate inferences about emotions, even when parts of the faces were covered. These data suggest that while there may be some challenges for children incurred by others wearing masks, in combination with other contextual cues, masks are unlikely to dramatically impair children's social interactions in their everyday lives.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.