Media release

From: The Royal Society

• Masking your emotions – Masks and sunglasses inhibit identity and emotion recognition in both ‘super recognisers’ and the general population. When asked to recognise celebrities or emotions, both masks and sunglasses reduced accuracy by a similar amount. Face masks do not present much more of a challenge than sunglasses, a face covering that we are all familiar with.

Face masks present a new challenge for human face identification and emotion recognition in Western cultures. We tested the effect of masks and sunglasses on identity and emotion recognition. Both masks and sunglasses reduced accuracy, with most errors for masks, but overall there was little difference in performance with masks compared to sunglasses. Super-recognisers, people with exceptional face recognition ability, were impaired by masks and sunglasses, but as a group performed more accurately than controls. Our results suggest that face masks do not present much more of a challenge than sunglasses, a face covering that we are all familiar with.