Waizman Yael, Vaccaro Anthony G, Newsome Phillip, Aviv Elizabeth C, León Gabriel A, Berzenski Sara R, Saxbe Darby E
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California.
Department of Psychology, California State University, Northridge.
Emotion. 2025 Apr;25(3):706-724. doi: 10.1037/emo0001444. Epub 2024 Nov 11.
Facial emotion recognition is vital for human social behavior. During the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks were widely adopted for viral mitigation and remain crucial public health tools. However, questions persist about their impact on emotion recognition and neural processing, especially in children, parents, and young adults. We developed the Masked Affective and Social Cognition task, featuring masked and unmasked faces displaying fear, sadness, and anger. We recruited three racial and ethnically diverse samples: 119 college students, 30 children who entered school age at the beginning of the pandemic, and 31 fathers of the aforementioned children. Of the latter two groups, 41 participants ( = 23 fathers, 18 children) did the Masked Affective and Social Cognition task during a neuroimaging scan, while the remaining 20 participants ( = 8 fathers, 12 children) who were not eligible for scanning completed the task during their lab visit. Behaviorally, we found that participants recognized emotions less accurately when viewing masked faces and also found an interaction of emotion by condition, such that accuracy was particularly compromised by sad masked faces. Neurally, masked faces elicited greater activation in the posterior cingulate, insula, and fusiform gyrus. Anterior insula and inferior frontal gyrus activation were driven by sad, masked faces. These results were consistent across age groups. Among fathers, activation to sad masked faces was associated with stress and depression. Overall, our findings did not depend on previous mask exposure or timing of participation during the pandemic. These results have implications for understanding face emotion recognition, empathy, and socioemotional neurodevelopment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
面部情绪识别对人类社会行为至关重要。在新冠疫情期间，口罩被广泛用于减轻病毒传播，并且仍然是重要的公共卫生工具。然而，关于口罩对情绪识别和神经处理的影响，尤其是对儿童、父母和年轻人的影响，问题依然存在。我们开发了蒙面情感与社会认知任务，其中包括显示恐惧、悲伤和愤怒的蒙面和非蒙面面孔。我们招募了三个种族和族裔多样化的样本：119名大学生、30名在疫情开始时进入学龄期的儿童以及上述儿童的31位父亲。在后两组中，41名参与者（=23名父亲，18名儿童）在神经成像扫描期间完成了蒙面情感与社会认知任务，而其余20名不符合扫描条件的参与者（=8名父亲，12名儿童）在实验室访问期间完成了该任务。在行为方面，我们发现参与者在观看蒙面面孔时识别情绪的准确性较低，并且还发现了情绪与条件之间的相互作用，即悲伤的蒙面面孔尤其会降低准确性。在神经方面，蒙面面孔在后扣带回、脑岛和梭状回中引发了更大的激活。前脑岛和额下回的激活是由悲伤的蒙面面孔驱动的。这些结果在各年龄组中是一致的。在父亲中，对悲伤蒙面面孔的激活与压力和抑郁有关。总体而言，我们的研究结果不取决于之前是否接触过口罩或在疫情期间参与的时间。这些结果对于理解面部情绪识别、同理心和社会情感神经发育具有重要意义。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
