Face masks inhibit facial cues for approachability and trustworthiness: an eyetracking study
Ongko Bylianto, Listryarinie, and Chan, Chan Kai Qin (2023) Face masks inhibit facial cues for approachability and trustworthiness: an eyetracking study. Current Psychology, 42. pp. 26996-27007.
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Abstract
Wearing face masks during the Covid-19 pandemic has undeniable benefits from our health perspective. However, the interpersonal costs on social interactions may have been underappreciated. Because masks obscure critical facial regions signaling approach/avoidance intent and social trust, this implies that facial inference of approachability and trustworthiness may be severely discounted. Here, in our eyetracking experiment, we show that people judged masked faces as less approachable and trustworthy. Further analyses showed that the attention directed towards the eye region relative to the mouth region mediated the effect on approachability, but not on trustworthiness. This is because for masked faces, with the mouth region obscured, visual attention is then automatically diverted away from the mouth and towards the eye region, which is an undiagnostic cue for judging a target’s approachability. Together, these findings support that mask-wearing inhibits the critical facial cues needed for social judgements.
| Item ID: | 76252 |
|---|---|
| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1936-4733 |
| Keywords: | eye tracking; face mask; trustworthiness; approachability; Covid |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Apr 2023 02:16 |
| FoR Codes: | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5205 Social and personality psychology > 520505 Social psychology @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280121 Expanding knowledge in psychology @ 100% |
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