From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of surgical masks became widespread. However, they occlude an important part of the face and make it difficult to decode and interpret other people’s emotions. To clarify the effect of surgical masks on configural and featural processing, participants completed a facial emotion recognition task to discriminate between happy, sad, angry, and neutral faces. Stimuli included fully visible faces, masked faces, and a cropped photo of the eyes or mouth region. Occlusion due to the surgical mask affects emotion recognition for sadness, anger, and neutral faces, although no significative differences were found in happiness recognition. Our findings suggest that happiness is recognized predominantly via featural processing.
【저자키워드】 COVID-19, emotion recognition, surgical mask, Face processing, alexithymia, featural processing, configural processing, 【초록키워드】 COVID-19 pandemic, surgical, Mask, eye, Neutral, Occlusion, participant, Affect, widespread, facial, occlude, 【제목키워드】 Mask, emotion, processing, Effect,