Emotion Recognition of Masked vs. Unmasked Faces: Mitigating Cognitive and Psychopathological Factors

• In Event: Face masks and socioemotional development: Multimodal research on emotion processing of masked faces

Abstract

Recognition of emotional expressions typically integrates information from both the eyes and mouth. Although research confirms that adults perform worse on emotion recognition tasks when stimuli are wearing face masks (Grundmann et al., 2021), it is unclear whether disaggregating eye/mouth information impacts higher-order emotion and social competence. Further, attentional style and control may mitigate differences in performance on masked emotion recognition tasks. The ability to flexibly deploy attention may make recognizing challenging stimuli easier, if attention is focused on eyes rather than distracted by non-relevant features. In addition, anxious individuals may either struggle more with challenging interpersonal scenarios or may perform better if anxiety is associated with increased attention to nuanced facial features and experience decoding facial expressions. This study examined discrepancies in emotion recognition accuracy of masked vs. unmasked faces, the extent to which these discrepancies are associated with deficits in emotion and/or social competence, and the extent to which cognitive and psychopathological factors influence these discrepancies.

119 undergraduate students (Mage = 20.70; 70.6% female; 57.1% Hispanic/Latinx, 14.3% Asian, 13.4% white, 6.7% Black, 7.6% multiethnic) completed self-report measures and the emotion recognition task (via screen sharing during synchronous videoconferencing). Trials varied by masked/unmasked condition, emotion presented, and child vs. adult face.

Linear mixed models identified main effects of emotion (p < .001; scared > angry > sad), age of stimulus (p = .004; adult > child), and condition (p < .001; unmasked > masked) on accuracy. An interaction between emotion and age indicated the age difference was only significant for scared faces. An interaction between emotion and condition indicated the difference between masked/unmasked conditions was most pronounced for sad faces, then scared, and not significant for angry. There were no interactions involving social competence, indicating that more socially competent individuals did not perform better (i.e., did not have a smaller differential between masked and unmasked conditions). There was a main effect of emotion competence on accuracy (p < .001), but no interactions with condition. There were main effects (p = .007) and interactive effects of attentional style with emotion and condition (p = .032), such that bottom-up attention processes were associated with higher accuracy and better performance (smaller condition differential), particularly for sad faces. There were no effects of overall attentional control. Finally, there were no main or interactive effects of generalized anxiety. However, there was a main effect of social anxiety on accuracy (p = .019) and an interaction between social anxiety and condition (p = .026), such that higher social anxiety indicated better performance.

These results suggest that discerning emotional expressions from masked faces is not an essential skill of emotion and social competence. However, individuals prone to bottom-up attention processing may have the skills to discern expressions from eyes, and socially anxious individuals may have the experience and motivation to do it. These findings are encouraging regarding concerns of damage to socioemotional competence from mask exposure. Overly high capacity for emotion recognition may instead be associated with maladaptive attentive tendencies and excessive attention to social partners.

Author

• Sara R. Berzenski, California State University - Northridge
  Presenting Author