What do face masks do to how we read faces?
Surgical masks made adults worse at naming celebrities, reading most emotions and judging gender, but they actually made angry faces easier to recognise.
Source
Face masks affect emotion categorisation, age estimation, recognition, and gender classification from faces
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Online within-subject experiment: every participant did four face tasks with intermixed masked and unmasked faces, with participant gender as a between-subjects factor
- N
- N=108 · 108 adults analysed (56 men, 52 women) after excluding 2 of 110 who finished implausibly fast; the age-estimation analysis appears to have slightly fewer cases (its degrees of freedom drop by one)
- Population
- Adult online participants recruited through Testable Minds; the authors describe the sample and face stimuli as Caucasian
- Outcome
- Famous-face naming accuracy, six-choice emotion categorisation accuracy, gender classification accuracy, and absolute age-estimation error, for masked versus full faces
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What they did
Adults recruited online completed four tasks in which half the faces had a surgical mask digitally added over the nose and mouth. They named 20 famous faces, picked which of six emotions a face showed, classified hairless faces as male or female, and typed in the estimated age of faces from their 20s to 70s. Masked and unmasked trials were mixed within each task, and the authors also compared male and female participants.
What they found
Masks lowered famous-face naming accuracy (from 0.65 to 0.61 on average), mainly for female celebrities. Emotion recognition dropped sharply, from 61.77% correct on full faces to 44.97% with masks, for happy, sad, surprised, disgusted and fearful faces; anger was the exception and was recognised better when masked. Gender classification fell modestly, almost entirely for female faces (about 92% to 85%), while masks had no overall effect on age error, though female faces' ages were estimated less accurately when masked. Women outperformed men at emotion recognition, and men's famous-face naming was hurt by masks while women's was not.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Faces were photographs with masks pasted on digitally and viewed briefly online, which differs from meeting a masked person with voice, movement and context. Masked and unmasked faces were intermixed, and the authors note this may have encouraged picture-matching strategies that make mask effects look smaller than in a blocked design. The authors say participants and faces were all Caucasian, so cultural generalisation is untested. Several of the participant-gender interactions were only just significant and their direction was not firmly predicted, so they need replication.
Key terms
- Bruce and Young model
- A classic model of face processing in which identity recognition and expression analysis run along separate routes after an initial structural encoding stage.
- Holistic face processing
- Perceiving a face as an integrated whole, including the spatial relations between features, rather than as separate parts.
- Six-alternative forced choice
- A response format where participants must pick one of six fixed options, here the six basic emotions, so guessing gives one correct answer in six.
- Absolute age-estimation error
- The size of the gap between estimated and actual age, ignoring whether the guess was too old or too young.
- Own-gender bias
- A tendency to process faces of one's own gender more accurately than faces of the other gender.
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Quiz yourself
Which task showed the largest drop in accuracy with masks?
Common questions
Why would a mask make anger easier to recognise?
The authors suggest anger is carried mainly by the brows and eyes, while the mouth region often causes anger to be confused with disgust; covering the mouth removes that confusion.
Did masks affect all four tasks equally?
No. Emotion recognition was hit hardest, famous-face naming and gender classification modestly, and age estimation showed no overall effect, only an effect for female faces.
Should this be read as an argument against wearing masks?
The authors explicitly say no; the findings describe social costs of masks, not a reason to abandon them where they are medically useful.
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