Masks and emotions

Three years ago, when you said someone was wearing a mask it meant that they were being fake or not real.

Today it’s a very different story and masks have become a part of our everyday lives.

Even on safari!

Whatever your feelings are about masks, here’s a truth that we cannot deny and something I think might have affected us a lot more than we all think.

When you wear a face mask for protection, it also hides your facial expressions which affects the way you communicate.

When wearing a figurative mask, this might well be your intention, but the last few years we have had the imposed challenge of not being able to communicate effectively because as humans, we are dependent on facial expressions and body language to communicate effectively.

A famous psychologist, Paul Ekman, whose work focused on faces and emotions, found that humans express seven core emotions through non-verbal cues and facial expressions. These are:

joy
anger
fear
surprise
sadness
contempt
disgust

Now I don’t know if you’ve had this, but I have found myself, on multiple occasions, pulling my mask down from my mouth while trying to listen to what someone is saying to me.

In my mind, pulling my mask down will make me hear someone else a bit better.

If you think about it, it makes 100% sense.

There is something about wearing a mask, covering your face, that induces pretty strong emotions but it seems like, for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to live with a hindered communication and find alternative ways to convey certain nuanced emotions and expressions.

Anyway, I found all this pretty interesting and had a chuckle again earlier today when I was speaking to someone and we both reached for our masks to better understand each other.

So what is the lesson we can learn from the fact that we can’t communicate as effectively through non-verbal cues and facial expressions due to covid masks?