Poster #97 - Effect of Facial Masks on Children’s Emotion Recognition: Duration of Exposure Matters

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

Reading facial cues is an important aspect of emotion recognition in children. During the Covid-19 pandemic, wearing facial masks has been the norm around the world, temporarily reducing the amount of visible facial cues. Yet different countries adopted mask mandates to different extents. Hence, children in different parts of the world have been less or more exposed to faces with masks. In this pre-registered study (https://osf.io/e42m9), we made use of this differential amount of mask exposure and investigated two questions: First, does facial masks affect 4- to 6-year-old children’s emotion recognition in adult faces? Second, does the duration of children’s exposure to masks associate with their emotion recognition? We tested children from Switzerland (N = 38) and Brazil (N = 41), two representative countries with different mask mandates. Brazil imposed longer mask exposure, which we also confirmed with a questionnaire asking children’s mask exposure duration (M = 31.0, 20.7, SD = 15.7, 11.8, respectively for Brazil and Switzerland, in hours per week). In an online emotion recognition task consisting of 36 trials, children were asked to point to the face displaying a certain emotion (happy, angry, or sad) from a selection of 4 different actors, each displaying one of the three emotions or a neutral face. Depending on the condition, different parts of the face were covered. The actors either wore no cover, a facial mask, or sunglasses. A 3 (condition) x 3 (emotion) x 2 (country) mixed ANOVA revealed a significant 3-way interaction (F(3.61, 278.15) = 3.25, p = .016, η2p = 0.04). We broke it down by running separate 2-way ANOVAs for each country. In Brazil, children recognized emotions better in the sunglasses and no cover conditions than the mask condition for all emotions, whereas in Switzerland, this effect occurred for happiness only, with no difference between conditions in the other emotions (Figure 1). Moreover, Brazilian children were better at recognizing happy faces than Swiss children (p = .004). A linear regression showed that emotion recognition was predicted by the hours of mask exposure, with no significant interaction with country or condition (p < .0001; Figure 2). These findings suggest that facial masks negatively impact children’s emotion recognition. However, with prolonged exposure to masks, children appear to adapt to and compensate for the lack of facial cues from the nose and mouth, especially for happiness, which is usually best recognized in this lower region of the face. Children also seem to benefit from prolonged mask exposure in reading facial cues in general given that longer hours of exposure is associated with better emotion recognition also in uncovered faces. In conclusion, masks may impair kindergarten children’s emotion recognition in the short run, but may benefit their broader reading of facial emotional cues in the long run.

Authors

• Ebru Ger, Universität Bern
  Presenting Author

• Mirella Manfredi, University of Zurich

• Ana Osorio

• Camila Ribeiro

• Alessandra Almeida

• Güdel Annika

• Marta Calbi

• Moritz M Daum, University of Zürich