Once a rarity, face masks of all shapes and sizes have become commonplace in the last year. Essential for containing the Covid-19 pandemic, the masks do, however, have certain side effects on non-verbal communication, as documented by an increasing number of studies.

 "Normally, we are quite good at associating emotion with a certain facial expression. However, when this is disguised, we struggle a lot more," says Marco Marini, PhD student at the Department of Psychology and first author of a study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, in collaboration with the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology and the Institute of Neuroscience of the National Research Council and the University of Turin.

The experiment, designed and carried out entirely online during the spring of 2020, involved 122 subjects, who were asked to judge the emotional state and degree of trustworthiness expressed by specific photographs of faces.

While 41 subjects saw unmasked faces, another 40 were presented with masked faces. "As expected, subjects who see masked faces make far more errors in recognising the emotions they express", explains Alessandro Ansani, "confirming the importance of the orofacial region in decoding emotions."

 "Moreover", adds Fabio Paglieri, "those same faces that are considered unreliable without a mask are, when disguised, much less suspicious to us."

 But the most original result of the study concerns a third group of 41 subjects, who had to judge emotions and trustworthiness in faces covered by a mask with a transparent plastic window revealing the mouth. In the latter group, the perception of emotions was unaffected, while the impression of untrustworthiness was only partially attenuated.

In the second phase of the experiment, subjects were shown several faces without masks and asked to indicate whether they had already encountered them during the previous task. In this case, transparent masks showed no advantage over traditional masks.

The study stimulates reflection on the desirability of more widespread use of transparent face masks, at least in contexts where non-verbal communication plays an important role.

References:

The impact of facemasks on emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification - Marco Marini, Alessandro Ansani, Fabio Paglieri, Fausto Caruana & Marco Viola - Sci Rep (2021) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84806-5

Info 

Alessandro Ansani
Department of Psychology
alessandro.ansani@uniroma1.it