Mask-wearing improved wearers’ sense of the attractiveness of faces, which were rated as less attractive when a mask was not worn after the onset of COVID-19; also, were rated as more healthy after onset

Effects of Masks Worn to Protect Against COVID-19 on the Perception of Facial Attractiveness. Miki Kamatani et al. i-Perception, June 27, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/20416695211027920

Abstract: Wearing a sanitary mask tended, in the main, to reduce the wearer’s sense of perceived facial attractiveness before the COVID-19 epidemic. This phenomenon, termed the sanitary-mask effect, was explained using a two-factor model involving the occlusion of cues used for the judgment of attractiveness and unhealthiness priming (e.g., presumed illness). However, these data were collected during the pre-COVID-19 period. Thus, in this study, we examined whether the COVID-19 epidemic changed the perceived attractiveness and healthiness when viewing faces with and without sanitary masks. We also used questionnaires to evaluate beliefs regarding mask wearers. We found that the perception of mask-worn faces differed before versus after the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic. Specifically, mask-wearing improved wearers’ sense of the attractiveness of faces, which were rated as less attractive when a mask was not worn after the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic. Furthermore, mask-worn faces were rated as healthier after the onset of the COVID-19. The proportion of respondents with negative associations regarding mask-wearing (e.g., unhealthiness) decreased relative to before the epidemic. We suggest that the weakening of this association altered the sanitary-mask effect with a relative emphasis on the occlusion component, reflecting the temporal impact of a global social incident (the COVID-19 epidemic) on the perception of facial attractiveness.

Keywords: sanitary mask, COVID-19, facial attractiveness, healthiness

General Discussion

In this study, we investigated the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on beliefs regarding sanitary mask wearers as well as the perceived attractiveness of mask-worn faces by comparing data collected pre- and post-COVID-19-onset in Japan. Study 1 revealed that beliefs regarding sanitary mask wearers during the COVID-19 period differed from those in the pre-COVID-19 period. Specifically, the number of respondents who reported that they felt mask wearers were unhealthy decreased regardless of the mask color. Instead, the number of respondents who rated mask wearers as neutral or healthy increased. This change in belief was strengthened by the disappearance of the sanitary-mask effect after the onset of the epidemic, as shown in Study 2. During the pre-COVID-19 period, mask wearers were perceived as less attractive in general. This indicates that the discount in perception of attractiveness caused by mask-wearing was larger for baseline attractive faces and smaller or negligible for baseline unattractive faces (Miyazaki & Kawahara, 2016). This discounted perception did not occur for baseline unattractive faces in this study. Instead, for mask-worn faces, the perceived attractiveness ratings for baseline unattractive faces were higher.

This change in the perceived attractiveness of mask-worn faces can be explained by the reduced association between unhealthiness and sanitary masks. This reduction was supported by the results of Study 3, that is, that mask-worn faces were perceived as healthier after the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic compared with before the epidemic. Mask-worn faces were perceived as less healthy than no-mask faces regardless of the measurement period (before or after the onset of the epidemic). However, our data indicate that the association between mask-wearing and unhealthiness had weakened. We suggest that this reduction in the strength of the association was caused by the change of the purpose of mask use. Specifically, before the COVID-19 epidemic, masks were associated with personal medical problems experienced by the wearer, such as symptoms of illness (e.g., coughing or rhinorrhea) or allergies to pollen. After the onset of the epidemic, masks became associated with society-wide attempts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection and have become a social norm such that seeing mask-worn people may encourage an individual to wear a mask (Nakayachi et al., 2020).

Our results were consistent with the two-factor model of the sanitary-mask effect. Miyazaki and Kawahara (2016) provided converging evidence to support the model, which was proposed before the COVID-19 epidemic. Furthermore, prior to the onset of the epidemic, they predicted that removing the perception of unhealthiness associated with mask-wearing would reduce the negative impact on attractiveness ratings. To examine this possibility, they replaced a mask with a notebook and found that the results supported their prediction. They replicated this finding by replacing a mask with a card that occluded the same lower area of the face. The pattern they observed was similar to our finding in Study 2, which was consistent with the two-factor model.

Our data, along with those of previous studies, indicate that the mechanism underlying the modulation of attractiveness by mask-wearing is related to the occlusion of critical features. Occluding less attractive faces can hide negative features, such as asymmetric contours, imbalanced arrangements of facial features, and pimples. This could shift attractiveness ratings toward the average, and thus improve ratings for baseline unattractive faces. The opposite is true for attractive faces. Occluding attractive faces can hide positive features, such as symmetric contours, balanced arrangements of features, and smooth skin. This could shift attractiveness ratings toward the average, thus reducing ratings for baseline attractive faces. These ideas were supported by the findings of Study 2. Because the association between unhealthiness and mask-wearing had weakened after the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic, the effects of masks on ratings of perceived unhealthiness were similar to those of the notebooks and cards used to occlude faces in Miyazaki and Kawahara’s (2016; Experiments 3a, 3b, and 4) occlusion experiments. This mechanism may be related to recent findings that perceived facial attractiveness ratings improved when faces were partially occluded by vertical occluders or randomly scattered dots (Orghian & Hidalgo, 2020).

This study revealed the impact of a social incident, that is, the COVID-19 epidemic, on perceptions of attractiveness of mask-worn faces. Given that larger attitude shifts regarding support for politicians concerned about climate change were found in individuals who reported greater suffering from hurricanes (Rudman et al., 2013), our finding that beliefs and perceptions regarding the attractiveness and healthiness of mask-worn faces had already changed just months after the explicit onset of the COVID-19 epidemic in Japan (the first patient was found on January 16) implies that the magnitude of the impact is large. Accordingly, we expect that modulation of the sanitary-mask effect directly reflects the progress of the epidemic. In other words, this study demonstrated a contextual modulation of facial perception that took place over a short period of time. However, given that the context in which individuals view target faces can modulate facial attractiveness in a laboratory setting (e.g., varying the proportion of beard-worn vs. clean-shaven faces; Janif et al., 2014), the modulation observed in this study may change with the severity of the epidemic. Long-term measurements of beliefs and perceptions regarding mask-worn faces would provide more information regarding the impact of the epidemic on societies worldwide.

There are two limitations to this study. First, the three-way Period × Baseline attractiveness × Mask presence interaction was not significant, probably due to differences in the baseline conditions of the previous (Miyazaki & Kawahara, 2016) and present studies, although the trend indicated by the results was consistent with the predicted direction. Therefore, the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on perceived attractiveness warrants careful interpretation and further examination. Second, the change in the purpose of mask use might have introduced a demand bias effect such that participants might have avoided saying that they found a given mask-wearing woman unattractive due to the social norms governing mask-wearing. The demand bias may explain the results for faces with low attractiveness scores, but this explanation is not applicable to faces with high attractiveness scores. Therefore, we believe that the present results cannot be solely attributed to demand bias. Nonetheless, this is a limitation of this study, although it was unavoidable.