Wearing face masks is one of the essential means to prevent the transmission of certain respiratory diseases such as coronavirus disease COVID Although acceptance of such masks is increasing in the Western hemisphere, many people feel that social interaction is affected by wearing a mask. In the present experiment, we tested the impact of face masks on the readability of emotions. Each face was randomly presented with six different expressions angry , disgusted , fearful , happy , neutral , and sad while being fully visible or partly covered by a face mask.
We further detected specific confusion patterns, mostly pronounced in the case of misinterpreting disgusted faces as being angry plus assessing many other emotions e.
We discuss compensatory actions that can keep social interaction effective e. Wearing face masks 1 is recommended in many scenarios, mostly in clinical contexts, when infected by certain respiratory diseases or in times of epidemics where the risk of potential transmission through air passages has to be reduced Jefferson et al. During the coronavirus disease COVID pandemic, most countries and health organizations like the WHO propagated wearing face masks by early as a key strategy to reduce the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 SARS 2 coronavirus.
Face masks not only have a direct positive medical impact in terms of preventing the virus from spreading to those who are most vulnerable Wu and McGoogan, ; they also have positive societal effects as wearing masks allows for the relaxing of other preventive measures such as strict isolation and quarantining Mniszewski et al.
However, face masks also cover, per definition, a major part of the human face, which can crucially affect social interaction. Although congenital prosopagnosia shows a high prevalence rate of about 2. For instance, they compensate for the impaired capability of reading facial identification cues by means of using different sources of information such as the characteristic gait or gesture, or by using information from other modalities, such as the characteristic voice pattern of a person.
