Malak Cansu, Yildirim Funda
Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Türkiye.
Front Psychol. 2025 Aug 12;16:1586186. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586186. eCollection 2025.
Face masks, a common practice during COVID-19, remain important in various cultural and medical contexts. Studies have shown how face masks affect our ability to recognize emotions, highlighting the role of facial features. Gaze direction plays a key role in modulating the identification of emotions, particularly in the presence of masks. So far, little is known about how gaze and masks influence emotion processing via physiological measures like pupil size. Here, we used pupillometry with 40 participants to investigate how emotion recognition (anger, fear, neutral) is affected by both gaze direction (direct, averted) and face mask conditions (mask, no mask). Behaviorally, our findings align with previous research, showing that the eye region plays a key role in identifying anger and neutral expressions more effectively than fear. Similarly, direct gaze improves accuracy for anger and neutral, while averted gaze enhances fear recognition. Pupillometry results revealed condition-specific changes in pupil size that partially mirrored the behavioral patterns, although no strong correlation with accuracy was found. However, pupil size was even more strongly modulated by recognition errors, with significantly greater dilation during incorrect trials across all emotions, especially for masked fearful faces, suggesting increased cognitive effort and ambiguity. The data also indicate compensatory processing mechanisms, when masks obscured parts of the face, participants appeared to rely more heavily on gaze direction and visible emotional cues. We propose that pupil dilation may reflect the cognitive load of emotion identification, providing important input for adaptive support applications in HCI and VR to improve user experiences.
口罩在新冠疫情期间是一种常见做法，在各种文化和医学背景下仍然很重要。研究表明口罩如何影响我们识别情绪的能力，凸显了面部特征的作用。注视方向在调节情绪识别中起着关键作用，尤其是在有口罩的情况下。到目前为止，关于注视和口罩如何通过瞳孔大小等生理指标影响情绪处理，人们知之甚少。在此，我们对40名参与者进行了瞳孔测量，以研究情绪识别（愤怒、恐惧、中性）如何受到注视方向（直接注视、回避注视）和口罩情况（戴口罩、不戴口罩）的影响。在行为方面，我们的研究结果与之前的研究一致，表明眼部区域在识别愤怒和中性表情方面比恐惧表情更有效地发挥关键作用。同样，直接注视提高了对愤怒和中性表情的识别准确率，而回避注视则增强了对恐惧表情的识别。瞳孔测量结果显示了瞳孔大小的特定条件变化，部分反映了行为模式，尽管未发现与准确率有强烈相关性。然而，瞳孔大小受识别错误的调节作用更强，在所有情绪的错误试验中，瞳孔扩张明显更大，尤其是对于戴口罩的恐惧面孔，这表明认知努力和模糊性增加。数据还表明了补偿性处理机制，当口罩遮住面部部分区域时，参与者似乎更依赖注视方向和可见的情绪线索。我们认为瞳孔扩张可能反映了情绪识别的认知负荷，为改善人机交互和虚拟现实中的用户体验的自适应支持应用提供重要输入。
