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. 2023 Mar 27;70(8):1532-1540.
doi: 10.1080/20473869.2023.2189765. eCollection 2024.

The effects of face masks on emotional appraisal ability of students with autism spectrum disorder

Elizabeth Tate  1 , Keith Wylie  1 , Jennifer D Moss  1
Affiliations

The effects of face masks on emotional appraisal ability of students with autism spectrum disorder

Elizabeth Tate et al. Int J Dev Disabil. .

Abstract

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered the ways in which people are able to communicate effectively. The addition of the face mask as a distracting stimulus interrupts the holistic process that people use to interpret facial expressions. The present study seeks to investigate the impact of face masking and gaze direction on emotion recognition in students with autism. We predicted that students with autism (n = 14), who characteristically experience difficulties when appraising emotions, would struggle to assess the emotions of people wearing face masks. We did not find a significant three-way interaction of emotion, mask, and gaze on classification accuracy. We did, however, find that face masks reduced participants' ability to emotionally appraise sad faces. Further, participants showed better accuracy appraising faces with a direct gaze. Exploring how face masks impact autistic individuals' emotion recognition will benefit special educators as they adapt to teaching during the pandemic, as well as the general population that seeks to improve communication with neurodiverse persons. Future studies should examine emotional appraisal ability and additional emotions as well as different kinds of emotional stimuli.

Keywords: Autism spectrum disorder; COVID-19; emotion appraisal; emotion recognition; facial emotion processing; nonverbal communication.

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Conflict of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Example images from each condition: (A) angry with averted gaze and mask, (B) angry with averted gaze and no mask, (C) angry with direct gaze and mask, (D) angry with direct gaze and no mask, (E) happy with averted gaze and mask, (F) happy with averted gaze and no mask, (G) happy with direct gaze and mask, (H) happy with direct gaze and no mask, (I) sad with averted gaze and mask, (J) sad with averted gaze and no mask, (K) sad with direct gaze and mask, (L) sad with direct gaze and no mask.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
One of the 36 questions on the emotion recognition task as it appears in Qualtrics.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Two-way interaction of mask and emotion on probability of correct emotional appraisal.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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