Masking Emotions: Face masks impair how we read emotions

As mask mandates started to disappear, I found myself dreading showing my whole face again. It takes considerable mental effort for me to choose the "correct" facial expression, and masks hide a conspicuous twitch in the corner of my mouth. Perhaps ironically, masks made me feel more confident in public and more willing to engage with strangers at e.g. the grocery store.

<i>Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old.</i><p>IMO masks are severely harming social and interpersonal development of young children, but any suggestion of removing the masks creates shit storm of controversy. The solution seems to be online learning, but it’s worth noting that a major group pushing for masks in school (teachers) are the same pushing online teaching. IMO That’s a disingenuous conflict of interest, but since pediatricians are also pushing masks for children in school, what’s the solution here? Maybe the solution is to create little plastic enclosed boxes so no child gets within 3 feet or 4 feet of another child. Everyone is surrounded by plastic like they are Hannibal Lecter, but at least they can see the smile on each other’s face…

Or, people on the spectrum have a temporary leg up. Make use of it guys!

People are generally <i>incredibly bad</i> at reading others&#x27; emotions anyway; if masks push us far enough towards actually realizing that fact, maybe it&#x27;s on the whole a <i>good</i> thing.<p>If it doesn&#x27;t matter, don&#x27;t worry about it--and if it does matter, just ask! You don&#x27;t need to be able to guess someone&#x27;s emotions from their face for society to function.

I have some friends who have talked about feeling like they can&#x27;t trust the people around them when everyone is wearing masks.<p>This has not been my experience – I suspect I&#x27;ve always relied on body language at least as much as facial cues, and that other people wearing masks doesn&#x27;t deprive me of as much information as it does for many others.

This may be common to other introverts: I tend to make my greetings, rather than verbally, with some kind of facial expression. Fortunately for me during the pandemic, I was pretty decent at the mime stuff and other physically emotive arts, so I have not been too impacted. I have noticed that I have been using my body and my (I am told &quot;expressive&quot;) hands quite a bit to compensate.<p>I wonder how much of that will stick around out of habit when we are eventually done with masks.

Man it was back to school night for my youngest daughter last night. We visited with her new teacher for a few minutes. The teacher asked her, &quot;Are you excited to be going back to school?&quot;<p>I think my daughter was glad she was wearing a mask at that moment. Probably she&#x27;ll have to wear that mask to school for most of the school year. I&#x27;d hate to be a teacher trying to figure out what my kids were actually thinking.

Only funny thing about this is that masks can actually be useful for hiding emotions like for example laughing at your college professors or at your boss.

They should invent mask with flexible displays on the outside and sensors on the inside.

while I don&#x27;t like wearing the mask in general, I do like that it helps me since I have a &quot;resting asshole face.&quot; A major reason why I preferred working remote before the pandemic.

Good.

the number one concern I&#x27;ve had with regards to face masks, above and beyond all else, has been the cognitive development of children growing up in these times. I&#x27;m no behavioral psychologist or whatever but surely concealing the facial expressions of adults and other children isn&#x27;t going to be very good for young children passively learning how to intuitively emote and show emotion in facial expressions! I realized this when I was working retail earlier this year and recognized that I could no longer smile at small children while masked. I&#x27;m afraid that a lot of decisions made in the past couple years are going to have unforeseen nth-order effects that won&#x27;t become fully apparent until later on.