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The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults

During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. In the current preregistered studies we hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood in adults and in adolescents betw...

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Autores principales: Kulke, Louisa, Langer, Theresia, Valuch, Christian
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9226820/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35756255
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.878002
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author Kulke, Louisa
Langer, Theresia
Valuch, Christian
author_facet Kulke, Louisa
Langer, Theresia
Valuch, Christian
author_sort Kulke, Louisa
collection PubMed
description During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. In the current preregistered studies we hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood in adults and in adolescents between 12 and 13 years of age, who are in a critical phase of social development. We found that mood was positively related to face-to-face but not to virtual interactions in adults and that virtual interactions were associated with negative mood in adolescents. This suggests that contact restrictions leading to a decrease in face-to-face compared to virtual interactions may be related to negative mood. To understand if prolonged exposure to people wearing masks during the pandemic might be related to increased sensitivity for subtle visual cues to others’ emotions from the eye region of the face, we also presented both age groups with the same standardized emotion recognition test. We found slightly better performance in emotion recognition from the eyes in our student sample tested during the pandemic relative to a comparable sample tested prior to the pandemic although these differences were restricted to female participants. Adolescents were also better at classifying emotions from the eyes in the current study than in a pre-pandemic sample, with no gender effects occurring in this age group. In conclusion, while social distancing might have detrimental effects on self-reported mood, the ability to recognize others’ emotions from subtle visual cues around the eye region remained comparable or might have even improved during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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spelling pubmed-92268202022-06-25 The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults Kulke, Louisa Langer, Theresia Valuch, Christian Front Psychol Psychology During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. In the current preregistered studies we hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood in adults and in adolescents between 12 and 13 years of age, who are in a critical phase of social development. We found that mood was positively related to face-to-face but not to virtual interactions in adults and that virtual interactions were associated with negative mood in adolescents. This suggests that contact restrictions leading to a decrease in face-to-face compared to virtual interactions may be related to negative mood. To understand if prolonged exposure to people wearing masks during the pandemic might be related to increased sensitivity for subtle visual cues to others’ emotions from the eye region of the face, we also presented both age groups with the same standardized emotion recognition test. We found slightly better performance in emotion recognition from the eyes in our student sample tested during the pandemic relative to a comparable sample tested prior to the pandemic although these differences were restricted to female participants. Adolescents were also better at classifying emotions from the eyes in the current study than in a pre-pandemic sample, with no gender effects occurring in this age group. In conclusion, while social distancing might have detrimental effects on self-reported mood, the ability to recognize others’ emotions from subtle visual cues around the eye region remained comparable or might have even improved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-06-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9226820/ /pubmed/35756255 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.878002 Text en Copyright © 2022 Kulke, Langer and Valuch. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Kulke, Louisa
Langer, Theresia
Valuch, Christian
The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults
title The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults
title_full The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults
title_fullStr The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults
title_full_unstemmed The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults
title_short The Emotional Lockdown: How Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Influence Mood and Emotion Recognition in Adolescents and Adults
title_sort emotional lockdown: how social distancing and mask wearing influence mood and emotion recognition in adolescents and adults
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9226820/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35756255
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.878002
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