ArticleFrontiers in psychology2021
Face Masks Protect From Infection but May Impair Social Cognition in Older Adults and People With Dementia.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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
9 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Visual exposure to masked faces benefits personally familiar but not famous face recognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- No evidence for disruption of empathy and mentalizing by face coverage in multimodal settings.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stress and coping in parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.PloS one · 2024Article
- Communicating and reading emotion with masked faces in the Covid era: A short review of the literature.Psychiatry research · 2022Review
- Article
- Surgical face masks do not impair the decoding of facial expressions of negative affect more severely in older than in younger adults.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Personality and compliance with COVID-19 protective measures among older Americans: Moderating effects of age, gender, and race/ethnicity.Personality and individual differences · 2022Article
- Unmasking the psychology of recognizing emotions of people wearing masks: The role of empathizing, systemizing, and autistic traits.Personality and individual differences · 2022Article
- Face Mask Reduces the Effect of Proposer's (Un)Trustworthiness on Intertemporal and Risky Choices.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will have a high impact on older adults and people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Social cognition enables the understanding of another individual's feelings, intentions, desires and mental states, which is particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic. To prevent further spread of the disease face masks have been recommended. Although justified for prevention of this potentially devastating disease, they partly cover the face and hamper emotion recognition and probably mindreading. As social cognition is already affected by aging and dementia, strategies must be developed to cope with these profound changes of communication. Face masking even could accelerate cognitive decline in the long run. Further studies are of uppermost importance to address face masks' impact on social cognition in aging and dementia, for instance by longitudinally investigating decline before and in the pandemic, and to design compensatory strategies. These issues are also relevant for face masking in general, such as in medical surroundings-beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.