Research published in the journal Social Psychology found that masks hinder the recognition of six basic facial expressions. According to the research, facial expressions can be deduced in part by looking at the lower half of the face.

Study author Sarah McCrackin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for Social Attention and Cognition at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, said, “We know that humans communicate with facial cues, and of those cues, facial expressions are one of the most important because they signal another individual’s emotional state.”

In order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, wearing a mask is essential. However, because they cover the lower part of the face, these facial cues are hidden.” It was our goal to find out whether or not wearing face masks made us less able to recognize facial expressions.”

With the help of 120 undergraduate students, the researchers conducted a study that asked them to identify the emotions of male or female faces in the presence or absence of masks. The expressions on the people’s faces ranged from happy to sad to fearful to surprised to disgusted to angry to neutral. Participants also took tests to determine whether or not they possessed any of the “big five” personality traits associated with autism.

It is important to remember that face masks make it difficult to read facial expressions, according to McCrackin. It was discovered in our research that wearing masks made it more difficult to accurately discern the six basic human emotions of anger (anger), sadness (sadness), fear (fear), happiness (happiness), disgust (disgust), and surprise (surprise). While our physical health is being negatively impacted as well, the pandemic has had a profound effect on our social health as well,” he says.

Additionally, participants who displayed more autistic characteristics performed worse on an emotion recognition task, according to the researchers. However, masks did not appear to worsen the link between autistic traits and a poor ability to recognize emotional cues.. Autistic traits in the typically developing population may be linked to a more general impairment of emotion recognition, perhaps due to an overall increased difficulty in reading social cues rather than specific issues with recognizing particular facial cues,” McCrackin and her colleagues wrote in their study.

McCrackin noted that the findings of this study raise a slew of important questions for the future. For example, we need to know how face masks’ social effects can be minimized. The use of clear masks, which would keep us safe while still allowing us to see visual cues, could be another option. Emotional information that has been lost can be restored by providing more verbal information (e.g., informing our conversation partners that we have had a bad or good day).”

To that end, McCrackin explained that more research was needed into the potential effects of prolonged visual exposure to masked individuals. It is still unknown how visual exposure during childhood or later in life affects face perception, even though we know it is a skill that can be learned. Eventually, people may be able to recognize emotions solely from the information contained in someone’s eyes.”

Earlier studies have found that wearing a mask makes it more difficult to read facial expressions and may even alter how the brain processes facial information.

In addition to the pandemic, it is important to think about the social impact of face masks in other contexts, like healthcare,” McCrackin said. It is important for doctors to recognize when patients are experiencing negative emotions like anger or sadness as part of their job.” As a result of our findings, we believe that doctors should be aware of the communication limitations that face masks impose when working with patients.