from The Waking Times:

Poor air quality and the use of face masks have been a daily fact of life for many living in China. Since the 1950s, some in Japan, China and Taiwan have worn masks as a means of protecting themselves against air pollution. They also wear them for other reasons, specific to culture.¹

In Japan, people wear masks when they feel sick and women wear them when they go out without makeup. Bradley Sutton is an American who lived in Japan. He told a reporter from VOA News that wearing a mask in Asia is ingrained in their culture, so doing it for reasons other than air pollution is easier.²

Despite the problem with air quality before the first SARS outbreak in China in 2002, masks were not a regular part of every Asian’s life. It was only after SARS that they were used consistently. Manufacturers in East Asia are now producing up to 20 million masks each month. Before SARS, people living in Taiwan believed masks marked them as being severely ill.

Since then, the Taiwanese have embraced the use of a mask. In a commentary in China Under the Radar, the writer believes young Chinese are wearing them to build a “social firewall” and avoid being approached by others, “just as sunglasses or headphones would.”³ While real-world testing indicates that masks used for air pollution vary widely in their effectiveness, they have become a staple in Asian life.⁴

After the World Health Organization declared SARS-CoV-2 a global pandemic, masks have become more commonplace around the world. Since science and testing has not yet caught up, many are choosing to wear a mask in public to allay others’ fears. Whether or not they are effective, it’s important to recognize the communication problems they introduce and to know how to address those problems.

Decoding Facial Actions Helps Categorize Emotion

Masks have removed a crucial way in which people use visual cues to communicate and understand each other. Smiles, cheek twitches and lip movements are all lost under a mask. These visual perceptions of expression are part of how people recognize and understand communication.

In a paper published in Current Opinions in Psychology, one professor from The Ohio State University hypothesized that to interpret emotion, the visual system, including the eyes and brain, attempts to identify muscle activation in the face.⁵

Based on computational, behavioral and imaging evidence, he believes humans are able to effortlessly infer an emotional state by reading facial expressions. This is different from the categorical model that proposes there are six distinct and universal emotions that are communicated across cultures. These are happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and fear.⁶

The second theory is related to a dimensional model that suggests there are varying dimensions across emotions that are not distinct. Researchers have found evidence that supports the use of more than one way to categorize expression. While this may be highly interesting to psychological researchers, what does it mean in terms of our ability to communicate, when we can’t see most facial expressions?

When adults were tested, they did not have to acknowledge they had seen a face for their brain to recognize the expression.⁷ While this is a good indication of how quickly the visual system communicates with the brain, when facial expressions are not fully visible, this recognition is hampered.

Rebecca Brewer from the Royal Holloway University of London points out that humans process a person’s whole face rather than paying attention to a singular feature, such as the eyes, nose or mouth. “When we cannot see the whole face, such holistic processing is disrupted,” she says.⁸

Brewer adds that this happens even in countries where the women wear veils in public. Children and adults learn to interpret information from the whole face; expressions on others’ faces, even furrowed brows, are used in several cognitive processes.⁹

Your Face Is an Effective Communication Tool

Aleix Martinez is the researcher from The Ohio State University. He has been studying the recognition of facial expressions while programming machine learning algorithms.

He believes that relying on facial expressions can also be misleading and explains that the key to interpretation is the study of the entire body posture, motion and context.¹⁰ Yet, your face communicates more than what’s coming out of your mouth. The authors of one paper described it this way:¹¹

“One of the richest and most powerful tools in social communication is the face, from which observers can quickly and easily make a number of inferences — about identity, gender, sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical health, attractiveness, emotional state, personality traits, pain or physical pleasure, deception, and even social status.”

In countries where facial coverings are new, many are struggling with the ability to communicate and find it hard to breathe. While this may be difficult for lots of people, it can be overwhelming for those with communication difficulties or psychological trauma. For example, people who are deaf can no longer read lips, which severely hinders communications with a person who doesn’t know sign language.¹²

Masks Can Trigger a PTSD Episode

Yet another concern with widespread mask-wearing is related to people who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and those who may be traumatized from the pandemic. Yuval Neria of the New York State Psychiatric Institute runs the institute’s PTSD program and told the American Heart Association that mental health professionals are in uncharted territory in predicting the effects of this pandemic:¹³

“I don’t think the mental health consequences will be limited to PTSD only. In fact, I think we should expect other mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse and potentially increase in suicide. They are already there and kind of showing themselves.

Disasters are usually limited to space and time. And there is an onset of a disaster – which may take some time – but there is an end. But I think viruses have their own way to inflict adversities on us. The threat is ambiguous. (It) is everywhere and nowhere. It’s ongoing. It may take a long time.”

There is concern that the pandemic is also affecting those who have a history of trauma. PTSD is not limited to people who served in the armed services. Men and women who are victims of domestic abuse or sexual assault may have significant difficulty wearing masks.

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