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Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions

While face masks prevent the spread of disease, they occlude lower face parts and thus impair facial emotion recognition. Since emotions are often also contextually situated, it remains unknown whether providing a descriptive emotional context alongside the facial emotion may reduce some of the nega...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: McCrackin, Sarah D., Ristic, Jelena
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9537697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36211857
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.928524
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author McCrackin, Sarah D.
Ristic, Jelena
author_facet McCrackin, Sarah D.
Ristic, Jelena
author_sort McCrackin, Sarah D.
collection PubMed
description While face masks prevent the spread of disease, they occlude lower face parts and thus impair facial emotion recognition. Since emotions are often also contextually situated, it remains unknown whether providing a descriptive emotional context alongside the facial emotion may reduce some of the negative impact of facial occlusion on emotional communication. To address this question, here we examined how emotional inferences were affected by facial occlusion and the availability of emotional context. Participants were presented with happy or sad emotional faces who were either fully visible or partially obstructed by an opaque surgical mask. The faces were shown either within an emotionally congruent (e.g., “Her cat was found/lost yesterday afternoon”) or neutral (“Get ready to see the next person”) context. Participants were asked to infer the emotional states of the protagonists by rating their emotional intensity and valence. Facial occlusion by masks impacted the ratings, such that protagonists were judged to feel less intense and more neutral emotions when they wore masks relative to when their face was fully visible. Importantly, this negative impact of visual occlusion by mask was reduced but not fully eliminated when the faces were presented within a congruent emotional context. Thus, visual occlusion of facial emotions impairs understanding of emotions, with this negative effect of face masks partially mitigated by the availability of a larger emotional context.
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spelling pubmed-95376972022-10-08 Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions McCrackin, Sarah D. Ristic, Jelena Front Psychol Psychology While face masks prevent the spread of disease, they occlude lower face parts and thus impair facial emotion recognition. Since emotions are often also contextually situated, it remains unknown whether providing a descriptive emotional context alongside the facial emotion may reduce some of the negative impact of facial occlusion on emotional communication. To address this question, here we examined how emotional inferences were affected by facial occlusion and the availability of emotional context. Participants were presented with happy or sad emotional faces who were either fully visible or partially obstructed by an opaque surgical mask. The faces were shown either within an emotionally congruent (e.g., “Her cat was found/lost yesterday afternoon”) or neutral (“Get ready to see the next person”) context. Participants were asked to infer the emotional states of the protagonists by rating their emotional intensity and valence. Facial occlusion by masks impacted the ratings, such that protagonists were judged to feel less intense and more neutral emotions when they wore masks relative to when their face was fully visible. Importantly, this negative impact of visual occlusion by mask was reduced but not fully eliminated when the faces were presented within a congruent emotional context. Thus, visual occlusion of facial emotions impairs understanding of emotions, with this negative effect of face masks partially mitigated by the availability of a larger emotional context. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-09-23 /pmc/articles/PMC9537697/ /pubmed/36211857 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.928524 Text en Copyright © 2022 McCrackin and Ristic. 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
McCrackin, Sarah D.
Ristic, Jelena
Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions
title Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions
title_full Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions
title_fullStr Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions
title_full_unstemmed Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions
title_short Emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions
title_sort emotional context can reduce the negative impact of face masks on inferring emotions
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9537697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36211857
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.928524
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