No evidence for disruption of empathy and mentalizing by face coverage in multimodal settings

In social interactions, we often encounter situations where a partner’s face is (partially) occluded, e.g., when wearing a mask. While emotion recognition in static faces is known to be less accurate under such conditions, we investigated whether these detrimental effects extend to empathic responding, mentalizing (i.e., Theory of Mind), and prosociality in more naturalistic settings. In four studies (N total = 157), we presented short video clips of narrators recounting neutral and emotionally negative autobiographical stories, with their faces shown in four conditions (two per experiment): fully visible, eyes covered, mouth covered, and audio-only. Participants then responded to questions assessing affect, mentalizing performance, and willingness to help. Affect ratings were slightly lower when the narrator’s mouth was covered, and participants were less willing to help narrators with covered eyes. Importantly, however, empathic responding and mentalizing performance remained robust across visibility conditions. Thus, our findings suggest that social understanding – specifically, empathizing and mentalizing – is not substantially impeded by partial or complete facial occlusion, when other cues, such as vocal information, can be used to compensate. These insights may help contextualize concerns about detrimental effects of face coverage in social interactions.