ArticlePersonality and individual differences2022
Unmasking the psychology of recognizing emotions of people wearing masks: The role of empathizing, systemizing, and autistic traits.
Article in Personality and individual differences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring the Broader Autism Phenotype: How Alexithymia Impacts Recognition of Facial Expressions of Pain.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- The Impact of Threatening Facial Expressions on Negotiation: An Eye-Tracking Study.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
- Article
- Masked emotions: does children's affective state influence emotion recognition?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Influence of child and adult faces with face masks on emotion perception and facial mimicry.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Social sensitivity predicts accurate emotion inference from facial expressions in a face mask: a study in Japan.Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2023Article
- Face memory and facial expression recognition are both affected by wearing disposable surgical face masks.Cognitive processing · 2023Article
- Automatic facial emotion recognition at the COVID-19 pandemic time.Multimedia tools and applications · 2023Article
- Recognition of masked and unmasked facial expressions in males and females and relations with mental wellness.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Article
- Anthropomorphic Robotic Eyes: Structural Design and Non-Verbal Communication Effectiveness.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Masked emotions: Do face mask patterns and colors affect the recognition of emotions?Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- The influence of face mask on social spaces depends on the behavioral immune system.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Mapping the perception-space of facial expressions in the era of face masks.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Reading Emotions in Faces With and Without Masks Is Relatively Independent of Extended Exposure and Individual Difference Variables.Frontiers in psychology · 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
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people around the world have been wearing masks. This has negatively affected the reading of facial emotions. In the current study, the ability of participants' emotional recognition of faces and the eye region alone (similar to viewing masked faces) was analyzed in conjunction with psychological factors such as their capacity to empathize, systemize and the degree of autistic traits. Data from 403 healthy adults between 18 and 40 years revealed a significant difference between faces and eyes-only conditions for accuracy of emotion recognition as well as emotion intensity ratings, indicating a reduction in the capacity to recognize emotions and experience the emotion intensities of individuals wearing masks. As expected, people who were more empathetic were better at recognizing both 'facial' and 'eyes-only' emotions. This indicates that empathizers might have an upper hand in recognizing emotions of masked faces. There was a negative correlation between the degree of autistic traits and emotion recognition in both faces and eyes-only conditions. This suggests that individuals with higher levels of autistic traits would have greater difficulty recognizing emotions of both faces with and without masks. None of the psychological factors had a significant relationship with emotion intensity ratings. Finally, systemizing tendencies had no correlation with either emotion recognition or emotion intensity ratings.
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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.