Study reveals, covering faces around kids would not help mask emotions

Washington [US], December 25 (ANI):

According to a new study, the proliferation of face coverings in order to keep a check on Covid-19, isn’t keeping children from understanding facial expressions.

According to a study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it is quite easy to understand the emotions of people around. Just by taking in all the hints, they’re dropping, whether on purpose or not. Yet when people cover some of their facial expressions, they take some of those cues away.

“We now have this situation where adults and kids have to interact all the time with people whose faces are partly covered, and a lot of adults are wondering if that’s going to be a problem for children’s emotional development,” says Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in UW-Madison’s Child Emotion Lab.

The researchers showed more than 80 children, ages 7 to 13, photos of faces displaying sadness, anger, or fear that were unobstructed, covered by a surgical mask, or wearing sunglasses. The kids were asked to assign an emotion to each face from a list of six labels. The faces were revealed slowly, with scrambled pixels of the original image falling into their proper place over 14 stages to better simulate the way real-world interactions may require piecing things together from odd angles or fleeting glimpses.

The kids were correct about the uncovered faces as often as 66 percent of the time, well above the odds (about 17 percent) of guessing one correct emotion from the six options. With a mask in the way, they correctly identified sadness about 28 percent of the time, anger 27 percent of the time, and fear 18 percent of the time.

Source: ANI

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