Effects of mask use and other‐race on face perception, emotion recognition, and social distancing during the COVID‐19 pandemic

We tested the effect of mask use and other-race effect (ORE) on (a)face recognition, (b)recognition of facial expressions, and (c)social distance. Caucasian subjects were tested in a matching-to-sample paradigm with either masked or unmasked Caucasian and Asian faces. The participants exhibited the best performance in recognizing an unmasked face condition and the poorest to recognize a masked face that they had seen earlier without mask. Accuracy was poorer for Asian faces than Caucasian faces. The second experiment presented Asian or Caucasian faces having emotional expressions, with and without masks. The participants emotion recognition performance decreased for masked faces. From the most accurately to least accurately recognized emotions were as follows: happy, neutral, disgusted, fearful. Performance was poorer for Asian stimuli compared to Caucasian. In Experiment 3 the same participants indicated the social distance they would prefer with each pictured person. They preferred a wider distance with unmasked faces compared to masked faces. Distance from farther to closer was as follows: disgusted, fearful, neutral, happy. They preferred wider social distance for Asian compared to Caucasian faces. Altogether, findings indicated that during the COVID-19 pandemic mask wearing decreased recognition of faces and emotional expressions, negatively impacting communication among people from different ethnicities. This investigation used three experiments to test the effect of mask use and other-race effect (ORE) on face perception in three contexts: (a) face recognition, (b) recognition of facial expressions, and (c) social distance. The first, which involved a matching-to-sample paradigm, tested Caucasian subjects with either masked or unmasked faces using Caucasian and Asian samples. The participants exhibited the best performance in recognizing an unmasked face condition and the poorest when asked to recognize a masked face that they had seen earlier without a mask. Accuracy was also poorer for Asian faces than Caucasian faces. The second experiment presented Asian or Caucasian faces having different emotional expressions, with and without masks. The results for this task, which involved identifying which emotional expression the participants had seen on the presented face, indicated that emotion recognition performance decreased for faces portrayed with masks. The emotional expressions ranged from the most accurately to least accurately recognized as follows: happy, neutral, disgusted, and fearful. Emotion recognition performance was poorer for Asian stimuli compared to Caucasian. Experiment 3 used the same participants and stimuli and asked participants to indicate the social distance they would prefer to observe with each pictured person. The participants preferred a wider social distance with unmasked faces compared to masked faces. Social distance also varied by the portrayed emotion: ranging from farther to closer as follows: disgusted, fearful, neutral, and happy. Race was also a factor;participants preferred wider social distance for Asian compared to Caucasian faces. Altogether, our findings indicated that during the COVID-19 pandemic mask wearing decreased both face recognition and recognition of emotional expressions, negatively impacting communication among people from different ethnicities.