Impact of Face Masks

Impact of Face Masks

 

    In the last few years with the pandemic, face masks have changed the lives of everyone drastically. First off, people had to learn to communicate without the helpful advantage of being able to understand people’s emotions based on their faces. Along with this, people have had to find other ways to understand people’s feelings, mainly by understanding emotions through people’s eyes and their voices. There have been loads of research done in the last two years aimed at understanding how the pandemic has shaped the lives of people today and their ability to communicate and understand each other.

         One article, titled “Face masks reduce emotion-recognition accuracy and perceived closeness,” explored the impacts of face masks on 191 German adults. This study revealed that “face masks diminish people’s ability to accurately categorize an emotion expression” (Grundmann et al.). This shows the impact of masks on a more social level, rather than populational. This study was also conducted on adults, which are thought to be more intellectually adapted to understanding people’s emotions based on their body language and facial expression. This then begs the question about the impact of face masks on children and how they impact the child’s development in facial recognition.

         In a study by Guy et al., the researchers were able to do face-sensitive brain responsive testing on children in their first year of life. During this study, they were able to understand the brain regions that involved visual processing in babies during their first year of life. The different regions and their usage were focused differently depending on the infant’s attentional state and it was mainly localized in the medial-anterior brain areas. This connects back to the current topic of the child’s development and how it has been changed or unchanged in their facial processing due to masks.

         In an article written by CNN, “Does mask-wearing harm your child’s development? Experts weigh in,” Kristen Rogers discusses this exact question. She describes a study one where 80 children ages 7 to 13 were shown photos of faces either unobstructed or covered by a surgical mask or sunglasses. The children were correct about the unobstructed faces 66% of the time and they were able to guess obstructed faces correctly about 17% of the time. This led to the researcher’s conclusion that the children have an “innate flexibility in adapting to challenges or catching up, some experts aren’t suspecting any long-term effects of mask-wearing on children’s development” (Rogers).

         All the various research that is continually progressing leads to the overall conclusion that masks diminish people’s ability to process others’ emotions. This more recent development is also important in both adults and children as it affects them both relatively closely.

Works Cited

Conte, Stefania, et al. “Face-Sensitive Brain Responses in the First Year of Life.” NeuroImage, vol. 211, 2020, p. 116602., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116602.

Grundmann, Felix, et al. “Face Masks Reduce Emotion-Recognition Accuracy and Perceived Closeness.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0249792.

Rogers, Kristen. “Does Mask Wearing Harm Your Child's Development? Experts Weigh In.” CNN, Cable News Network, 11 Aug. 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/11/health/masks-child-development-effects-covid-pande