Kulke Louisa, Langer Theresia, Valuch Christian
Neurocognitive Developmental Psychology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany.
Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Methods in Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Front Psychol. 2022 Jun 10;13:878002. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.878002. eCollection 2022.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. In the current preregistered studies we hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood in adults and in adolescents between 12 and 13 years of age, who are in a critical phase of social development. We found that mood was positively related to face-to-face but not to virtual interactions in adults and that virtual interactions were associated with negative mood in adolescents. This suggests that contact restrictions leading to a decrease in face-to-face compared to virtual interactions may be related to negative mood. To understand if prolonged exposure to people wearing masks during the pandemic might be related to increased sensitivity for subtle visual cues to others' emotions from the eye region of the face, we also presented both age groups with the same standardized emotion recognition test. We found slightly better performance in emotion recognition from the eyes in our student sample tested during the pandemic relative to a comparable sample tested prior to the pandemic although these differences were restricted to female participants. Adolescents were also better at classifying emotions from the eyes in the current study than in a pre-pandemic sample, with no gender effects occurring in this age group. In conclusion, while social distancing might have detrimental effects on self-reported mood, the ability to recognize others' emotions from subtle visual cues around the eye region remained comparable or might have even improved during the COVID-19 pandemic.
在新冠疫情期间，政府强制实施的诸如接触限制和佩戴口罩等保护措施显著影响了社交互动。在当前预先注册的研究中，我们假设这些措施可能会影响成年人以及12至13岁处于社交发展关键阶段的青少年的自我报告情绪。我们发现，在成年人中，情绪与面对面互动呈正相关，而与虚拟互动无关；在青少年中，虚拟互动与负面情绪相关。这表明，与虚拟互动相比，导致面对面互动减少的接触限制可能与负面情绪有关。为了解疫情期间长时间接触戴口罩的人是否可能与对面部眼部区域他人情绪的细微视觉线索的敏感度增加有关，我们还对两个年龄组进行了相同的标准化情绪识别测试。我们发现，与疫情前测试的可比样本相比，在疫情期间测试的学生样本在从眼睛进行情绪识别方面表现略好，不过这些差异仅限于女性参与者。在当前研究中，青少年从眼睛分类情绪的能力也比疫情前样本更好，且在这个年龄组中没有出现性别效应。总之，虽然社交距离可能对自我报告情绪有不利影响，但在新冠疫情期间，从眼部周围细微视觉线索识别他人情绪的能力保持相当，甚至可能有所提高。
