EXPRESS: Facial Occlusion with Medical Masks: Impacts on Emotion Recognition Rates for Emotion Types and Intensities

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing became prominent or required worldwide as a predominant preventative strategy up until and even after vaccines became widely available. Because masks make emotion recognition more challenging for both the face and voice, medical and behavioral/mental health providers became aware of the disruptions this generated in practitioner-patient relationships. The current set of studies utilized two adult samples, first from United States college students (N = 516) and second from the U.S. American general public (N = 115), to document the severity and types of errors in facial expression recognition that were exacerbated by medical mask occlusion. Using a within-subjects experimental design and a well-validated test of emotion recognition that incorporated multi-ethnic adult facial stimuli, both studies found that happy, sad, and angry faces were significantly more difficult to interpret with masks than without, with lesser effects for fear. Both high- and low-intensity emotions were more difficult to interpret with masks, with a greater relative change for high-intensity emotions. The implications of these findings for medical and behavioral/mental health practitioners are briefly described, with emphasis on strategies that can be taken to mitigate the impact in healthcare settings.