Face memory and facial expression recognition are both affected by wearing disposable surgical face masks

Faces are fundamental stimuli for social interactions since they provide significant information about people’s identity and emotional states. With the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic, global use of preventive measures, such as disposable surgical face masks (DSFMs), has been imposed. The massive use of DSFMs covering a large part of the face could interfere with identity and emotion recognition. Thus, the main aim of the current study was (i) to assess how DSFMs affect identity recognition (Experiment 1), (ii) how DSFMs affect emotion recognition (Experiment 2), and (iii) whether individual empathy levels correlate with emotion recognition with DSFMs. The potential relation between identity and emotion recognition with and without DSFMs was also investigated. Two tasks were administered to 101 healthy participants: (i) the Old-new face memory task aimed to assess whether the learning context (i.e., DSFMs on/off) affects recognition performance, whereas (ii) the Facial affect task explored DSFMs’ effect on emotion recognition. Results from the former showed that the stimuli’s features in the learning stage affect recognition performances; that is, faces wearing DSFMs were better recognized if wearing DSFMs at first exposure and vice versa. Results from the Facial affect task showed that DSFMs lead to reduced disgust, happiness, and sadness recognition. No significant correlation emerged between identity and emotion recognition. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) was administered to assess affective and cognitive empathy; however, IRI scores did not correlate with either face memory recognition or facial affect recognition. Overall, our results demonstrate (a) a “context effect” for face memory with and without DSFMs; (b) a disruptive effect of DSFMs depending on the expressed emotion; and (c) no correlation between empathy and emotion recognition with DSFMs. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10339-022-01112-2.