Face masks impair facial emotion recognition and induce specific emotion confusions

Abstract

Highlights 1. We studied how facial masks impair facial emotion recognition. 2. We used validated actors and facial expressions from the Radboud Faces Database. 3. Masks impaired recognition of disgust, fear, surprise, sadness, and happiness. 4. With masks, disgust was often misinterpreted as anger, and fear as surprise. 5. These results were replicated twice in large samples.

Keywords

• Face masks
• Facial emotion recognition
• Radboud Faces Database