Unmasking the psychology of recognizing emotions of people wearing masks: The role of empathizing, systemizing, and autistic traits

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people around the world have been wearing masks. This has negatively affected the reading of facial emotions. In the current study, the ability of participants' emotional recognition of faces and the eye region alone (similar to viewing masked faces) was analyzed in conjunction with psychological factors such as their capacity to empathize, systemize and the degree of autistic traits. Data from 403 healthy adults between 18 and 40 years revealed a significant difference between faces and eyes-only conditions for accuracy of emotion recognition as well as emotion intensity ratings, indicating a reduction in the capacity to recognize emotions and experience the emotion intensities of individuals wearing masks. As expected, people who were more empathetic were better at recognizing both ‘facial’ and ‘eyes-only’ emotions. This indicates that empathizers might have an upper hand in recognizing emotions of masked faces. There was a negative correlation between the degree of autistic traits and emotion recognition in both faces and eyes-only conditions. This suggests that individuals with higher levels of autistic traits would have greater difficulty recognizing emotions of both faces with and without masks. None of the psychological factors had a significant relationship with emotion intensity ratings. Finally, systemizing tendencies had no correlation with either emotion recognition or emotion intensity ratings.