Face masks inhibit facial cues for approachability and trustworthiness: an eyetracking study.

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 fro

SUBMITTER: Bylianto LO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9535231 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature