ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2022
Are Face Masks a Problem for Emotion Recognition? Not When the Whole Body Is Visible.
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 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- No evidence for disruption of empathy and mentalizing by face coverage in multimodal settings.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Effects of Interoceptive Awareness on Recognition of and Sensitivity to Emotions in Masked Facial Stimuli.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Understanding discourse in face-to-face settings: The impact of multimodal cues and listening conditions.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2025Article
- Article
- Emotion recognition in autism spectrum condition during the COVID-19 pandemic.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2024Article
- Development and testing of a questionnaire on the expectations and experiences with wearing face masks in inpatient and day hospitals.PloS one · 2024Article
- Hysteresis reveals a happiness bias effect in dynamic emotion recognition from ambiguous biological motion.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- Face masks influence emotion judgments of facial expressions: a drift-diffusion model.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- What influence do face masks have on reading emotions in faces?Neuroimage. Reports · 2022Article
- Ties between reading faces, bodies, eyes, and autistic traits.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- COVID-19 masks: A barrier to facial and vocal information.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The rise of the novel COVID-19 virus has made face masks commonplace items around the globe. Recent research found that face masks significantly impair emotion recognition on isolated faces. However, faces are rarely seen in isolation and the body is also a key cue for emotional portrayal. Here, therefore, we investigated the impact of face masks on emotion recognition when surveying the full body. Stimuli expressing anger, happiness, sadness, and fear were selected from the BEAST stimuli set. Masks were added to these images and participants were asked to recognize the emotion and give a confidence level for that decision for both the masked and unmasked stimuli. We found that, contrary to some work viewing faces in isolation, emotion recognition was generally not impaired by face masks when the whole body is present. We did, however, find that when viewing masked faces, only the recognition of happiness significantly decreased when the whole body was present. In contrast to actual performance, confidence levels were found to decline during the Mask condition across all emotional conditions. This research suggests that the impact of masks on emotion recognition may not be as pronounced as previously thought, as long as the whole body is also visible.
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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.