Can kids learn to read emotions when everyone is masked up?

I was in a meeting earlier this week, and I realised that I could not tell how it had gone - people were masked up, and I couldn't read their reaction. It got me thinking about how masks have hindered emotional 'reading' - and a few subsequent conversations with parents of babies made me realise that there are genuine worries out there about how young children's development may be affected. Will the prevalence of masks mean they do not learn to pick up emotional cues?

It seems masks do not make it harder to read emotions
at least from close-up source

There is good news here, I think. It's true that children and babies do sometimes look to a parent’s face as a clue about what to do (for example, babies avoid playing with a new toy if they see an adult react fearfully toward it) but in fact masks don't really get in the way of these readings. Psychiatric Vanessa LoBue's research suggests that anger, surprise, sadness and happiness remain very easy to read, despite masks.

This is critically important, because there are few more important skills than reading the emotions of others.  And this is the first step to knowing and naming our own emotions to ourselves.   

Primary school classroom often have posters showing how we look when we are sad, angry, disgusted and so on.  It's a critical step, especially for  learning to deal with negative emotions, because by understanding and distinguishing negative emotions we process them, transform them and detoxify their effects on our minds and bodies.  We can become less likely to adopt coping mechanisms like binge drink or eating, aggression, or self-harm. 

For example, when stressed out, people who can describe what they are feeling in precise ways consume 40% fewer alcohol drinks each time they go to a party than people have difficulty classifying what they feel.  Similarly, people who can label feelings using a rich vocabulary of emotional words are significantly less verbally and physically aggressive to people who push their buttons then the people have trouble classifying what they feel.

The 'emotional differentiation' that psychologists talk about does not mean obsessively ruminating on negative emotions; it's more about observing and describing what is being felt, without getting tangled up in these mental events. Mindfulness is one tool among many to that end; thinking while running or swimming is another; talking with a friend, parent or counselor is another still. But however we get there, if we can see our emotions as information about ourselves, not just raw feeling itself, then we can become wiser and more empowered in everyday situations.

Once you start looking into it, there is a great deal of research on this!  It seems that it's relatively easy for most people to distinguish between basic emotions which seem to be completely cross-cultural.

The seven emotions of sadness anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy and
surprise are usually easy to distinguish Source

But our emotional lives are, of course much richer than these basic seven emotions and examples like this wheel show that there is probably a great deal of room for us all to develop more nuanced degrees of self-awareness.  

Source

So even though I was not able to read the room in that meeting, it seem, that we may not have to worry about things like the effects of wearing a face mask on children’s emotional learning.  We can take some solace in the fact that children are quite flexible in terms of what and how they learn, and most of them are pretty resilient, especially with the protection of a face mask.

Reference

• Barrett, L. F. et al (2001) Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it: Mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion vol 15
• LoBue, V. (2021) Face Masks and Children’s Emotion Understanding Psychology Today.
• Matsumoto, D and Hwang, H. S. (2011) Reading facial expressions of emotion. Psychological Science.
• Simler, K. (2018) Elephant in the Brain Oxford University Press