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Love your neighbour, wear a mask: the effect of face masks on facial expression and

emotional recognition as reported by PWU undergraduate students

Angelique Joy Virata

Department of Psychology, School of Arts and Sciences

ABPY G15: Social Psychology

Melissa Necitas A. Alcazaren

February 2, 2023
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Abstract

Facial expressions play an important role in socialisation as a way for humans to

perceive information about the emotional states of others. Whether static or in motion, the

arrangement of facial features forming “basic emotions” are linked to facial reaction patterns,

regardless of an individual’s culture. This allows us to form judgments of one another’s

emotions and react accordingly. As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread worldwide, mask

mandates have also been issued in several countries including the Philippines. Face masks

used during the global pandemic are generally opaque and cover half of an individual’s face.

This paper aims to show whether the face mask policies enforced during the COVID-19

pandemic have impacted our abilities to correctly recognize emotions and facial expressions

of people wearing face masks. This will be assessed by showing subjects a selection of

images with the bottom halves of their faces either covered or uncovered, displaying a range

of emotions which vary in the upper or bottom halves of the face or both.
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Introduction

Facial expressions are “a mode of close-proximity non-vocal communication…

produced by mimetic/facial musculature.” (Burrows, 2008) A degree of recognition of facial

expressions exists in most advance primate species (Deb et. al, 2018), including humans.

However, the human face is by far the most specially adapted to emotional communication

out of all known organisms. By perceiving the movements of facial features, humans are able

to surmise and ascribe emotional value to facial expressions. However, the COVID-19

pandemic and its associated mask mandates have caused the wearing of face masks to be a

matter of everyday existence. This facial covering, which leaves only the top half of the face

visible, has been suggested to impair emotion recognition performance across a range of

emotions (Grahlow et. al, 2022).

The division of the face into several areas and their relative importance in the

recognition of facial expression is one problem that has divided researchers. In a cross-

examination of the same topic, Ekman et. al. (1972) found that two suggested the dominance

of the mouth area (Dunlap, 1927; Ruckmick, 1921), two found that none were dominant

(Coleman, 1949; Frois-Wittman, 1930) and three suggested that different areas were

important for different emotions (Hanawalt, 1944; Nummenmaa, 1964; Plutchik, 1962).

Facial expression recognition (FER) software also takes into account several dozen points on

the subject’s face and detects emotion based on a combination of comparison points to a

neutral face. Differences in recognition of expressions were also found to vary in images of

male or female images depending on the emotion (Dores, et. al, 2020).

Studies regarding occlusion (blocking) and its effects on emotion recognition

performance are relatively few in number. Marini et. al (2021) found that reading of facial

emotions was affected by the presence of a mask. In addition to accuracy of emotions,

individuals’ perceived closeness to others wearing a mask was also impacted (Grundmann,
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2021). Studies using sunglasses as a more common form of facial occlusion showed a

decreased accuracy of emotional recognition, but this number was found to be even lower in

images using face masks (Noyes, et. al, 2019). However, most studies are based on small

sample sizes and are localized to their regions. Further studies should therefore be conducted

before a global conclusion can be drawn.

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