Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.

Faces are one of the key ways that we obtain social information about others. They allow people to identify individuals, understand conversational cues, and make judgements about others' mental states. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, widespread mask-wearing practices were impl...

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Autores principales:	Elyssa M Barrick, Mark A Thornton, Diana I Tamir
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/8b62598ed9a14869800e882a550a754b
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:8b62598ed9a14869800e882a550a754b2021-11-25T06:18:59ZMask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.1932-620310.1371/journal.pone.0258470https://doaj.org/article/8b62598ed9a14869800e882a550a754b2021-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258470https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203Faces are one of the key ways that we obtain social information about others. They allow people to identify individuals, understand conversational cues, and make judgements about others' mental states. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, widespread mask-wearing practices were implemented, causing a shift in the way Americans typically interact. This introduction of masks into social exchanges posed a potential challenge-how would people make these important inferences about others when a large source of information was no longer available? We conducted two studies that investigated the impact of mask exposure on emotion perception. In particular, we measured how participants used facial landmarks (visual cues) and the expressed valence and arousal (affective cues), to make similarity judgements about pairs of emotion faces. Study 1 found that in August 2020, participants with higher levels of mask exposure used cues from the eyes to a greater extent when judging emotion similarity than participants with less mask exposure. Study 2 measured participants' emotion perception in both April and September 2020 -before and after widespread mask adoption-in the same group of participants to examine changes in the use of facial cues over time. Results revealed an overall increase in the use of visual cues from April to September. Further, as mask exposure increased, people with the most social interaction showed the largest increase in the use of visual facial cues. These results provide evidence that a shift has occurred in how people process faces such that the more people are interacting with others that are wearing masks, the more they have learned to focus on visual cues from the eye area of the face.Elyssa M BarrickMark A ThorntonDiana I TamirPublic Library of Science (PLoS)articleMedicineRScienceQENPLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 10, p e0258470 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Elyssa M Barrick Mark A Thornton Diana I Tamir Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.
description	Faces are one of the key ways that we obtain social information about others. They allow people to identify individuals, understand conversational cues, and make judgements about others' mental states. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, widespread mask-wearing practices were implemented, causing a shift in the way Americans typically interact. This introduction of masks into social exchanges posed a potential challenge-how would people make these important inferences about others when a large source of information was no longer available? We conducted two studies that investigated the impact of mask exposure on emotion perception. In particular, we measured how participants used facial landmarks (visual cues) and the expressed valence and arousal (affective cues), to make similarity judgements about pairs of emotion faces. Study 1 found that in August 2020, participants with higher levels of mask exposure used cues from the eyes to a greater extent when judging emotion similarity than participants with less mask exposure. Study 2 measured participants' emotion perception in both April and September 2020 -before and after widespread mask adoption-in the same group of participants to examine changes in the use of facial cues over time. Results revealed an overall increase in the use of visual cues from April to September. Further, as mask exposure increased, people with the most social interaction showed the largest increase in the use of visual facial cues. These results provide evidence that a shift has occurred in how people process faces such that the more people are interacting with others that are wearing masks, the more they have learned to focus on visual cues from the eye area of the face.
format	article
author	Elyssa M Barrick Mark A Thornton Diana I Tamir
author_facet	Elyssa M Barrick Mark A Thornton Diana I Tamir
author_sort	Elyssa M Barrick
title	Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.
title_short	Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.
title_full	Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.
title_fullStr	Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.
title_full_unstemmed	Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.
title_sort	mask exposure during covid-19 changes emotional face processing.
publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/8b62598ed9a14869800e882a550a754b
work_keys_str_mv	AT elyssambarrick maskexposureduringcovid19changesemotionalfaceprocessing AT markathornton maskexposureduringcovid19changesemotionalfaceprocessing AT dianaitamir maskexposureduringcovid19changesemotionalfaceprocessing
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Mask exposure during COVID-19 changes emotional face processing.

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