According to a new study, there is not too much face coverage to monitor Covid-19, keeping children from understanding facial expressions.
According to a study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it is very easy to understand the feelings of the people around. Just by incorporating all suggestions, they fall apart, whether for a reason or not. But when people cover some of their faces, they take off some of those locks.
“We now have this situation where adults and children have to constantly interact with people whose faces are partially covered, and many adults are asking if that will be a problem for children’s emotional development, ”says Ashley Ruba, a postgraduate researcher at the UW-Madison Children’s Emotion Lab.
The researchers showed more than 80 children, ages 7 to 13, pictures of faces showing unbridled sadness, anger, or fear, covered in a surgical mask, or wearing sunglasses. The children were asked to assign a emotion to each face from a list of six labels. The faces were slowly revealed, with scrambled pixels of the original image falling into their proper position over 14 levels to better illustrate how interactions in the world could be. putting things together from strange angles or visuals.
The children were right about the undetected faces as often as 66 percent of the time, well above the odd ones (about 17 percent) of measuring one correct feeling from the six options. . With a mask on the way, they correctly expressed sadness about 28 percent of the time, anger 27 percent of the time, and fear 18 percent of the time.
“Surprisingly, it was harder with parts of the face covered. But even with a mask covering the nose and mouth, children were able to recognize these feelings at a better level than possible, ”said Ruba, who published results today in the journal PLOS ONE with her co-author Seth Pollak, UW-Madison professor of psychology.
Differences in the results reflect differences in the way emotional information is conveyed by the face. Sunglasses made anger and fear difficult to identify, suggesting that the eyes and eyebrows are important for these facial expressions. Fear, often confused by surprise, was also the most difficult thing for children to see behind a mask – which can be complicated by covering the cheeks like the signature mouth shape of surprise. : O.
If children can do better than measure emotions even with a mask in place, they are likely to do even better in real situations.
“Emotions are not passed through your face,” Ruba says. “Voice calls, how someone positions their body, and what ‘s going on around them, all the other information that will help us to better predict how someone is feeling. ”
It all contributes to children developing their emotional abilities, even though some of their interactions with others take place through a face mask.
“I hope this calms some of the nerves,” Ruba says. “Children are very strong. They will be able to adapt to the information they receive, and masks are unlikely to delay their development in this case. ”
(This story was published from a wire group without text changes. Only the headline was changed.)
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