Impact of Face Covering on Social Cognition and Interaction

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Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the world, changing our habits and forcing us to wear face masks. Initial experimental research has shown that facemasks profoundly affect our ability to read face language, to recognize the identity of people and to regulate efficient social interactions. Understanding these mental and emotional states is crucial for social life, so that the time of a comprehensive Research Topic addressing the short and long-term behavioral and neural consequences of facial input deprivation (e.g., in terms of brain electric and neurometabolic responses, neurochemical, and neuro-hormonal, behavioral patterns) has come.

It is currently not fully understood the full range of consequences of face masking on our mental processes, including perception, emotions, social cognition, language and development. While it seems that face covering impairs the interpretation of facial expression, the recognition of face identities, and the ability to understand speech from visual inputs, it is not fully understood how, in particular, face covering might affect social cognition in individuals with neuropsychiatric conditions and deficits in social communications. Moreover, the brain mechanisms that are activated to compensate for the lack of facial information by increasing the relevance of body language and hand gestures are not fully understood. Whether, and if so how, deprivation of facial dynamics in covered faces alters the face-devoted neural circuits, while favoring other brain channels (e.g., the auditory, the sensory/motor, or the tactile one)? Are these social deficits measurable? Are these deficits affecting more deeply or severally specific ages or groups of individuals, and are they reducing the benefits of neurorehabilitative aides? This Research Topic will provide a platform for joint discussion among researchers and neuroscientists from different research approaches to facilitate knowledge exchange and translation.

We are interested in empirical research, reviews or meta-analyses covering the whole spectrum of investigations in the field of Cognitive neuroscience, Social and Affective Neuroscience and Neuropsychology, featuring EEG/ERP, MEG, TMS, PET and fMRI, connectivity and DTI, genetic, neuropharmacological, behavioral, psychological, and clinical studies on psychiatric and neurological patients. The studies might include investigations involving masked or partly covered faces, as well as pixelated or obscured faces. Faces should be preferentially front-view real photographs of human faces, but might include schematic faces or emoji faces. Investigations might be carried out in healthy or pathological groups (e.g. prosopagnosic patients, or autistic individuals) as well as in all ages from newborns to elderly, and might include individuals of different sexes, sexual identities, ethnic groups, cultures, lateral preferences (including right-handed and left-handed).

Keywords: Facial Expression, Social Cognition, Emotions, Theory of Mind, Face Identity, Prosopagnosia, Holistic Processing, Part-based Processing, N170, Social Neuroscience

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