Abstract
While masks are critical in mitigating disease contagion, they obscure facial features that are important for nonverbal social communication, i.e., emotions, intentions, or mental states. Here we investigated how nonverbal social communication is affected by mask wearing. We asked participants (n=117) to identify happy, angry, fearful, sad, surprised, disgusted, and neutral emotional expressions from masked and unmasked face images. Overall, the data indicated that both hit rate and sensitivity were reduced for all emotions when faces wore masks. Discrimination of disgust was impacted the most (52% reduction in sensitivity), indicating that recognition of this emotion relies strongly on information from the bottom of the face. Perception of sad (18% reduction), happy (15%), and surprised expressions (15%) were impacted less while angry (12%), neutral (8%) and fearful expressions (7%) were impacted the least, indicating that the recognition of these expressions may be largely driven by information from the top of the face (e.g., eyes). Together these results reveal novel insights about the face features contributing to different emotion recognition and additionally suggest an important impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on human social communication.