The sanitary-mask effect (Miyazaki and Kawahara in Jpn Psychol Res 58(3):261-272, 2016) is the finding that medical face masks prompt an image of disease and thus result in lower ratings of facial attractiveness of the wearer. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, medical masks have been found to increase attractiveness (Patel et al. in Plast…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks have been widely used in daily life. Previous studies have suggested that faces wearing typical masks that occlude the lower half of the face are perceived as more attractive than face without masks. However, relatively little work has been done on how transparent masks that reveal the lower half of the…

Face masks became prevalent across the globe as an efficient tool to stop the spread of COVID-19. A host of studies already demonstrated that masks lead to changes in facial identification and emotional expression processing. These changes were documented across ages and were consistent even with the increased exposure to masked faces. Notably,…

Over the past two years, face masks have been a critical tool for preventing the spread of COVID-19. While previous studies have examined the effects of masks on speech recognition, much of this work was conducted early in the pandemic. Given that human listeners are able to adapt to a wide variety of novel contexts in speech perception, an open…

Research suggests that discounting of delayed rewards (i.e., tendency to choose smaller immediate rewards over large later rewards) is a promising target of intervention to encourage compliance with public health measures (PHM), such as vaccination compliance. The effects of delay discounting, however, may differ across the types of PHMs, given…

To slow the spread of COVID-19, many people now wear face masks in public. Face masks impair our ability to identify faces, which can cause problems for professional staff who identify offenders or members of the public. Here, we investigate whether performance on a masked face matching task can be improved by training participants to compare…

Previous research has shown that even when famous people's identities cannot be discerned from faces that have been filtered with monochromatic noise, these unidentifiable famous faces still tend to receive higher familiarity ratings than similarly filtered non-famous faces. Experiment 1 investigated whether a similar face recognition without…

Use of face masks is one of the measures adopted by the general community to stop the transmission of disease during this ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This wide use of face masks has indeed been shown to disrupt day-to-day face recognition. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have predisposed impairment in face recognition and are…

Face masks have become common protective measures in community and workplace environments to help reduce the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Face masks can make it difficult to hear and understand speech, particularly for people with hearing loss. An aim of our cross-sectional survey was to…

The widespread use of face masks in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic has promoted research on their effect on the perception and recognition of faces. There is growing evidence that masks hinder the recognition of identity and expression, as well as the interpretation of speech from facial cues. It is less clear whether and in what manner masks…

Studies show that surgical face masks can have both positive and negative effects on attractiveness. Race has been implicated as a moderator of the size of this mask effect. Here, the moderating effects of expression, race and gender are explored. The mask effect was more positive for males than for females, for neutral faces than for smiling…

Protective face masks were one of the central measures to counteract viral transmission in the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior research indicates that face masks impact various aspects of social cognition, such as emotion recognition and social evaluation. Whether protective masks also influence social avoidance behavior is less clear. Our project…

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, face coverings were introduced as a safety measure in certain environments in England and some research suggests that they can affect emotion recognition. Factors such as own-ethnicity bias (e.g. whether people perceiving and expressing emotions are of the same ethnicity) and social biases are also known to…

The objective was to document the influence of face mask use by other people on communication experiences, participation in activities, and quality of life. Australian adults (n = 665) completed an online survey; 90.8% resided in a state with mandatory mask use outside the home and 44.1% self-reported hearing difficulties. Mask use was reported as…

Mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a growing interest in the functional impact of masks on speech and communication. Prior work has shown that masks dampen sound, impede visual communication cues, and reduce intelligibility. However, more work is needed to understand how speakers change their speech while wearing a mask and to…