Predominantly it's going to be strangers on the street. And it's really easy for us to use very few cues then with the people we're familiar with, to infer that emotion.Д«ut in reality, the people that these children are going to see with face masks aren't predominantly going to be their parents or their teachers. And we can assimilate that idea of someone's face in lots of different conditions into a nice template of their face. So yes, we will definitely get better if it's a familiar face, just simply because we're much more familiar with how those faces look under different conditions.

Katie - Do you suspect this might change in any way, depending on the relationship to the adult? Say, it's your parent or your teacher, you know, those really key interactions.

Taken from a database that is really commonly used, where we have really established that these are all sad faces and people have validated these as looking like sad faces or angry faces and so forth. Katie - The people, the faces, these were strangers, right? Just pictures on a screen. And there wasn't any massively major findings there other than boys were slightly quicker at recognising the anger emotion than girls were. And a fairly good gender balance between the children. Oftentimes in this type of research, there can be a tendency to focus on one subgroup, the majority, subgroup of children, but this one had a really nice balance across different ethnicities in the children. Helen - So there was a really nice spread of children. I'm just wondering if this kind of thing varies by individual or maybe by background or culture? Katie - How diverse were the group of kids. And it's really a nice finding to see that the children could still make out those emotions. But just looking at those images, it can be really tricky to distinguish between sadness and anger. So their body language, what they're saying or shouting, that type of thing, you can clearly distinguish. Now in the street, if you met somebody and they were sad or angry, there's many more cues that you would rely on aside from their face. We're talking about still images of faces here. So I thought it was really interesting that the children could clearly distinguish between sadness and anger. So we know that fear and surprise are really difficult to distinguish in terms of the real main key emotions. Katie - What do you reckon to the variation in how good the kids were at picking up on the different emotions?

So there is quite a lot of hope here, even though obviously we do better without any face coverings, the children could still largely interpret the emotions that were being conveyed. They found it very difficult to tell if the face was expressing fear or surprise when you have that almost wide-eyed look, if they're wearing either a face mask or sunglasses. And then it's only really when a face was expressing fear that the introduction of any sort of face covering, so a face mask or sunglasses, really made it hard for children to interpret that emotion. When we look at angry faces, again wearing a face mask didn't have that much of an effect - in terms of children still performed better than chance at recognising the angry emotion, whereas sunglasses really impaired that. They could still tell that the face was sad. Even if the face is wearing a mask or wearing sunglasses, children still performed better than chance. Indeed when we look at the individual emotions, children still performed significantly greater than chance at recognising the emotion for sad faces. However, that affect was relatively small. So no face mask and no sunglasses, that's not surprising. And as was expected, children were the most accurate at identifying facial emotion when there was no face covering at all. And the faces were either presented as a whole or presented with a face covering over them, just a surgical face mask, or they were presented as wearing sunglasses. Obviously as the face became clearer, this task became easier. And the children would say which emotion was being expressed in the face. And the images would start off really fuzzy and they would get clearer and clearer. Now, these children saw lots of images of faces and the faces had different facial expressions - sadness, anger, and fear. And that's a real key age where children start to rely heavily on using eyes to interpret emotional expression. Helen - This study focused on 81 children who were between the ages of 7 and 13. This month, Helen Keyes looked at a paper studying the implications of adults wearing face masks on childrenвЂ™s abilities to interpret emotions.

Hallucination experiment