Examining the influence of social anxiety biases on emotion recognition for masked versus unmasked facial expressions

Preliminary evidence suggests reductions in emotion recognition accuracy to mask-wearing faces compared to no-mask-wearing faces in healthy volunteers. In socially anxious individuals, who tend to interpret positive or neutral facial expressions as more negative, emotional decoding biases might be even more compromised. This study aimed to replicate and extend previous findings on the impact of mask-wearing on emotion recognition in a Western sample while also examining the impact of social anxiety symptom severity. One hundred eleven university students completed a computerized emotion recognition task depicting gender and race-balanced faces, each modeling one of the six basic emotions and a neutral expression, with and without a medical mask. Using repeated measures ANOVAs and ANCOVAs, we investigated the effect of facemask condition and social anxiety severity on emotion recognition performance. Consistent with earlier research, the results of this study replicated the finding that wearing face masks led to decreased accuracy in emotion recognition across all emotions tested. Contrary to expectations, social anxiety symptoms did not moderate this effect. Despite the observed reduction in emotion recognition accuracy associated with mask-wearing, socially anxious individuals did not appear to be at a higher risk of experiencing impaired emotion recognition compared to their less anxious counterparts.