STUDYING KIDS EMOTIONS

Little kids can often tell how people feel, even if the person is wearing a face mask, a new study of the Academy found. There have been some concerns that the face masks used at school during the pandemic may be hurting younger children’s development, but this research conducted by the students of Pediatrics suggests that kids recognize emotions as well as they could without masks.

For this study, students of Pediatrics showed 90 pictures at random to nearly 300 children ages 3 to 6. The photos of actors who expressed joy, anger, or sadness were shown. In half of the images, actors wore masks. They were asked to either name the emotion, point to a card showing emoticons with these emotions, tell the students that they didn’t know the answer, or say that they wanted to quit the experiment.

The children got most of the answers right and were able to match the emotions to the picture on the card at a nearly identical rate, whether the figure was wearing a mask or not.

Kids described the correct emotion more than 70% of the time when the actor was maskless and got it right more than 67% of the time when the figure wore a mask. The older the kids, the more answers they got correct. About a quarter of preschoolers had a harder time distinguishing sadness from anger and about 21% occasionally confused joy for anger or sadness.

“Actual face masks depicted in static pictures were significantly associated with emotion recognition in healthy preschool children, although differences were small and effect sizes were weak,” the students said.

As developmental psychologists, our students think there are many more aspects of the pandemic that could hurt a child’s development, like the social isolation they’ve had from peers when they’ve had to stay at home from school or if a parent were to lose a job, for example. Masks are probably at the bottom of the list of things to be concerned about.