Health experts generally agree that face masks slow the spread of the coronavirus. But there’s reason to worry about the negative effects — particularly among children.
Reading and interpreting facial expressions is a deeply human trait. “Socialization” is in large part learning the skills of nonverbal communication, the most important of which come from the face. Little children aren’t learning that this year.
The Brookings Institution offered this example: If a curious infant crawls up to an oven and is about to touch it, but looks at her mother first to see a fearful look on her face, the infant will likely decide not to touch the oven. This is social referencing at work: Children look to their parents and caretakers for emotional clues, often found in parents’ facial expressions or tones of voice, before responding to a new situation.
After 10 months of masks, children are having trouble reading facial expressions. One study found that children looking at faces covered with surgical-type masks identified sadness correctly about 28% of the time, anger 27% of the time, and fear 18% of the time. On the other hand, these same children were able to identify emotional expressions on uncovered faces about 66% of the time.
Fortunately, many experts believe that children will learn to adapt. A different study published last month found that face masks did not prevent children from picking up on emotional cues as long as adults used expressive gestures, body language, or different tones of voice instead.
“If children are able to interact with people wearing sunglasses, they can probably do the same thing with people wearing a mask,” Dr. Ashley Ruba, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Wall Street Journal. “My sense is that the kids will be all right.”
But children aren’t the only ones affected by this change. Adults are just as dependent on facial expressions to improve communication and foster connection, and it is almost impossible to do either when half of one’s face is covered all the time. As a result, we are forgetting how to socialize effectively.
“The face provides a massive amount of information,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Many people really feel the face, and our expressions are the readout of our identity.”
Masks might be necessary right now, but we shouldn’t let them become the new normal. The human face was meant to be read — take that away from us, and we will become less social, less open, less, well, human.
