Back to schools in the US with masks 3:03
(CNN) -
Young children can often tell how people feel, even if that person wears a mask, a new study published Monday found.
There has been some concern that masks worn at school during the pandemic may be damaging the development of younger children, but this research published in the scientific journal JAMA Pediatrics suggests that children recognize emotions as well as they could. without the masks.
For this study, researchers at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland showed 90 random images to almost 300 children aged 3 to 6 years.
The photos showed actors expressing joy, anger, or sadness.
In half of the images, the actors wore masks.
They were asked to name the emotion, point to a card showing emoticons with these emotions, tell the researcher that they did not know the answer or that they wanted to abandon the experiment.
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The children answered most of the answers correctly and were able to relate emotions to the image on the card at an almost identical rate, whether the figure was wearing a mask or not.
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The children described the correct emotion more than 70% of the time when the actor was not wearing a mask and they were correct more than 67% of the time when the figure wore a mask.
The older the children, the more correct answers.
About a quarter of preschoolers had a more difficult time distinguishing sadness from anger, and about 21% occasionally confused joy with anger or sadness.
"Real face masks represented in static images were significantly associated with emotion recognition in healthy preschool children, although the differences were small and the effect sizes were weak," the study said.
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Ashley Ruba, an expert in Developmental Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Childhood Emotions Laboratory, was not affiliated with this study, but did similar work during the pandemic.
He said he saw similar results with his work.
"Even with masks on, young children can probably still make reasonable inferences about other people's emotions," Ruba said.
“I like to point out that the face is not the most important way we communicate our emotions, it is just one way.
We also use tone of voice, we have body posture, we have other kinds of context clues that children and adults can use to figure out how people are feeling. "
For language processing, it is important for children to learn to lip-read, but it is clear from the research, he said, that a mask will not harm a child's development.
"The risks of contracting COVID-19 from not wearing a mask will likely outweigh any small communication problems children may have," he said.
As a developmental psychologist, Ruba believes that there are many more aspects of the pandemic that could harm a child's development, such as the social isolation they have had from their peers when they had to stay home from school or if one of parents lost a job, for example.
"Masks are probably at the bottom of the list of things to worry about," he said.
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