ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2022
The Recognition of Facial Expressions Under Surgical Masks: The Primacy of Anger.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Risks and benefits of face masks in children.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2026Review
- Pupillary responses to masked and gaze-averted faces.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Impact of face masks on empathy and communication in head and neck cancer patients: a case-control study.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- Inferring social signals from the eyes in male schizophrenia.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- 'The mirror of the soul?' Inferring sadness in the eyes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Drawing as a window to emotion with insights from tech-transformed participant images.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Investigating the impact of surgical masks on behavioral reactions to facial emotions in the COVID-19 era.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- On the brain struggles to recognize basic facial emotions with face masks: an fMRI study.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The bacterial burden of worn face masks-observational research and literature review.Frontiers in public health · 2024Review
- Wearing a KN95/FFP2 facemask has no measureable effect on functional activity in a challenging working memory n-back task.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2023Article
- Influence of child and adult faces with face masks on emotion perception and facial mimicry.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Recognition of masked and unmasked facial expressions in males and females and relations with mental wellness.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Occlusion facial expression recognition based on feature fusion residual attention network.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2023Article
- COVID-19 and psychiatric disorders: The impact of face masks in emotion recognition face masks and emotion recognition in psychiatry.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: The need to wear surgical masks in everyday life has drawn the attention of psychologists to the negative effects of face covering on social processing. A recent but not homogeneous literature has highlighted large costs in the ability to recognize emotions. Methods: Here it was investigated how mask covering impaired the recognition of facial mimicry in a large group of 220 undergraduate students. Sex differences in emotion recognition were also analyzed in two subgroups of 94 age-matched participants. Subjects were presented with 112 pictures displaying the faces of eight actors (4 women and 4 men) wearing or not wearing real facemasks, and expressing seven emotional states (neutrality, surprise, happiness, sadness, disgust, anger and fear). The task consisted in categorizing facial expressions while indicating the emotion recognizability with a 3-point Likert scale. Scores underwent repeated measures ANOVAs. Results: Overall, face masking reduced emotion recognition by 31%. All emotions were affected by mask covering except for anger. Face covering was most detrimental to sadness and disgust, both relying on mouth and nose expressiveness. Women showed a better performance for subtle expressions such as surprise and sadness, both in masked and natural conditions, and men for fear recognition (in natural but especially masked conditions). Conclusion: Anger display was unaffected by masking, also because corrugated forehead and frowning eyebrows were clearly exposed. Overall, facial masking seems to polarize non-verbal communication toward the happiness/anger dimension, while minimizing emotions that stimulate an empathic response in the observer.
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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.