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.

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.