Effect of mask on emotion recognition in children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing face masks is used as an effective measure to suppress the transmission of coronaviruses. Previous studies have revealed that mask use impaired emotion recognition of children and adults. The current study aimed to examine the effect of mask use on emotion recognition performance and pattern and consistency of eye movement of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), compared with typically developing (TD) children. Both the ASD and TD groups had impaired performance in the emotion recognition task when recognizing masked faces, i.e. lower accuracy and longer response time. When recognizing masked faces, both groups tended to adopt a more eye-focused pattern with more consistent gaze transition behaviour. Finally, the findings suggested that recognition performance and eye movement pattern change due to mask use during emotion recognition task had a weak to medium correlation with AQ scores for children with ASD, particularly when recognizing sadness and anger.