ArticlePloS one2021
Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- Face Processing in Early Development: A Systematic Review of Behavioral Studies and Considerations in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- A reverse hierarchy theory of social perception.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Impact of mask-wearing on emotion recognition accuracy and fixation duration in young children.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Visual exposure to masked faces benefits personally familiar but not famous face recognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Impact of partial occlusion of the face on multisensory emotion perception: Comparison of pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic.PloS one · 2025Article
- Influence of child and adult faces with face masks on emotion perception and facial mimicry.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Frequent experience with face coverings for 10 months improves emotion perception among individuals with high autistic traits: A repeated cross-sectional study.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Article
- Face masks influence emotion judgments of facial expressions: a drift-diffusion model.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- When less is not more: the effect of transparent masks on facial attractiveness judgment.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- Trends in eyebrow makeup after COVID-19 and long-COVID era.Health science reports · 2023Article
- Clinical Psychology and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Mixed Methods Survey Among Members of the European Association of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Treatment (EACLIPT).Clinical psychology in Europe · 2023Article
- How Are You Feeling? Interpretation of Emotions through Facial Expressions of People Wearing Different Personal Protective Equipment: An Observational Study.Nursing reports (Pavia, Italy) · 2022Article
- Communicating and reading emotion with masked faces in the Covid era: A short review of the literature.Psychiatry research · 2022Review
- A practical test of the link between perceived identifiability and prosociality with two field studies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Mask wearing affects emotion perception.i-Perception · 2022Article
- Masked emotions: Do face mask patterns and colors affect the recognition of emotions?Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- Face masks have a limited effect on the feeling of being looked at.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- How does the presence of a surgical face mask impair the perceived intensity of facial emotions?PloS one · 2022Article
- The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Exploring the role of COVID-19 pandemic-related changes in social interactions on preschoolers' emotion labeling.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Faces are one of the key ways that we obtain social information about others. They allow people to identify individuals, understand conversational cues, and make judgements about others' mental states. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, widespread mask-wearing practices were implemented, causing a shift in the way Americans typically interact. This introduction of masks into social exchanges posed a potential challenge-how would people make these important inferences about others when a large source of information was no longer available? We conducted two studies that investigated the impact of mask exposure on emotion perception. In particular, we measured how participants used facial landmarks (visual cues) and the expressed valence and arousal (affective cues), to make similarity judgements about pairs of emotion faces. Study 1 found that in August 2020, participants with higher levels of mask exposure used cues from the eyes to a greater extent when judging emotion similarity than participants with less mask exposure. Study 2 measured participants' emotion perception in both April and September 2020 -before and after widespread mask adoption-in the same group of participants to examine changes in the use of facial cues over time. Results revealed an overall increase in the use of visual cues from April to September. Further, as mask exposure increased, people with the most social interaction showed the largest increase in the use of visual facial cues. These results provide evidence that a shift has occurred in how people process faces such that the more people are interacting with others that are wearing masks, the more they have learned to focus on visual cues from the eye area of the face.
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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.