How facial masks alter the interaction of gaze direction, head orientation, and emotion recognition

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the way we interact with each other: mandatory mask-wearing obscures facial information that is crucial for emotion recognition. Whereas the influence of wearing a mask on emotion recognition has been repeatedly investigated, little is known about the impact on interaction effects among emotional signals and other social signals. Therefore, the current study sought to explore how gaze direction, head orientation, and emotional expression interact with respect to emotion perception, and how these interactions are altered by wearing a face mask. In two online experiments, we presented face stimuli from the Radboud Faces Database displaying different facial ex…