The Effect of Mask Wearing in Children's Recognition of Facial Expression

     As found in the research called Face-Sensitive Brain Responses in the First Year of Life (Conte et al., 2020), infants develop the ability to recognize faces from objects within three months of life. Within a year, infant brains exhibit specific cortical responses during facial processing. These developments are of course thanks to the infants repeated exposure to faces. Considering the pandemic that began early in the year of 2020, people are either strongly encouraged or mandated to wear mask in public setting and social gatherings. Face masks covers majority of a person’s facial features, only allowing viewers to see their eyes and eyebrows. This poses a question of whether face masks are detrimental to children developmentally since a large part of socialization comes from recognizing familiar faces and reading facial expressions.

The newspaper New York Times asks a similar question in their article “Do Masks Impede Children’s Development?”. The article features Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto for applied psychology and human development, who suggests a possible effect of mask wearing to children 12 years old and under. He states that mask wearing that covers half of a person’s face can negatively impact this age group because they often focus on individual facial features when recognizing people. Additionally, he mentions that people generally gather emotional information through facial muscle movements and a mask can impede this process by covering the access to this information. Finally, he brings up a possible difficulty in speech recognition because a vital part of this is through visually observing a speaker’s mouth when they are communicating to you.

Recent research in December 2020 conducted a study on the effect of mask wearing to reading facial expressions in children (Ruba & Pollak 2020). 81 participants from ages 7 to 13 years old were presented photos of 3 different facial expressions in three ways: without facial covering, with a mask, and with sunglasses. Results show that although children become less accurate in recognizing facial expression when the face is more covered, the difference in their performance is still above chance. There is also no significant difference in recognizing facial expression when a mask is worn compared to when sunglasses are worn. Children were also observed to be making their inferences according to an individual facial feature that is observable i.e., looking at the expression of the eyes and eyebrows when the face in the picture is wearing mask, or looking at a face’s lips when the eyes are covered by sunglasses.

Both the news article and the research paper also remind us that socializing and communication is not made solely on facial expressions/features. Plenty of the cues received by people are through gestures, body language, and auditory cues such as tone, inflection, and volume. Although there are some challenges brought upon by the masks, it is not found to significantly impact a child’s development.

References:

Ruba, Ashley L., and Seth D. Pollak. “Children's Emotion Inferences from Masked Faces: Implications for Social Interactions during COVID-19.” PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0243708.

Klass, Perri. “Do Masks Impede Children's Development?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/well/family/Masks-child-development.html.

Conte, S., Richards, J.E., Guy, M.W., Xie, W., & Roberts, J.E. (2020). Face-sensitive brain responses in the first year of life. NeuroImage, 211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.1166025