Masks’ Effects on Recognizing Emotions During COVID-19

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211220.260How to use a DOI?

Keywords

emotion perception; emotion recognition; emotional expression; masked emotions; facial expression recognition

Abstract

The recognition of emotion with facial expressions is essential to human communication, with the eyes and mouth being the most prominent features to identify emotions. Masks have become a part of everyone’s daily life during the pandemic. Since masks occlude the bottom half of the face, emotions may be more difficult to interpret accurately. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of face masks on the perception and recognition of emotions during COVID-19. For this study, a survey was created in which participants were asked to identify a person’s facial expression, which was either unmasked or masked. The faces expressed 6 emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, and sadness. 35 total participants completed the survey. Overall, the answers for each emotion were more accurate with the unmasked faces than the masked faces. Happiness and neutrality had the highest percentage of correct answers in both unmasked and masked faces. Sadness had the highest percentage of incorrect answers in unmasked faces, while disgust had the highest percentage of incorrect answers in masked faces. Chi-squared tests were performed to see if the masked conditions were independent of emotion recognition accuracy. With all the emotions added together, the use of masks significantly affected the accuracy of the responses (p<0.001). The responses for disgust (p<0.001), fear (p<0.05), happiness (p<0.01), and sadness (p<0.001) were significantly affected by the use of masks, while anger (p>0.05) and neutrality (p>0.05) were not. In conclusion, this study found that the use of masks significantly affects the recognition of emotions, especially fear, happiness, sadness, and disgust.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Betti (Zibei) Pang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/12/24
TI  - Masks’ Effects on Recognizing Emotions During COVID-19
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1542
EP  - 1546
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.260
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211220.260
ID  - Pang2021
ER  -