Are we in danger of becoming emotionally neutered? Communication during COVID-19

July 10, 2020, 9:23 pm

If you have ever tried to communicate with a friend at the other end of a train car, while wearing a face mask, despite of the ridiculous pantomiming, you would realize that it's next to impossible. In fact, we have taken for granted the integral part our mouth plays in even non-verbal communication. Apart from the fact that a face mask is suffocating, particularly in a tropical climates such as that of Sri Lanka, it impedes communication because words often sound muffled and makes mouthing and lip reading impossible. Besides, you can hardly tell a grimace from a smile from behind a mask, thereby making masked communication all the more easily misunderstood. To make matters worse, people have come to associate physical closeness with danger.

In such a backdrop imagine how difficult the mandatory mask rule and physical distancing must be for the deaf and hard of hearing. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over five percent of the world’s population has disabling hearing loss and for them face masks heighten the communication hurdle, further isolating an already marginalised community. According to the UN, volunteer groups have started manufacturing masks with transparent windows, for the benefit of those who lip read.

More than 50 countries mandate wearing face masks in public according to Aljazeera and it is highly unlikely the rule will be lifted any time soon. In reality face masks have created a communication gap in human interaction. This begs the question, many months into facial occlusion are we in danger of becoming emotionally neutered. Surgical mask induced 'alexithymia' or emotion blindness is a new phenomenon researchers are exploring into.

Scientific American article 'From behind the Coronavirus Mask, an Unseen Smile Can Still Be Heard' explains how social mimicry allows us to smile, at least inwardly, in reaction to seeing someone else smile. According to the study 'Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain' published in the Journal of Natural Science, Biology, and Medicine, the human brain fires neurons associated with an action or emotion displayed by a communication partner, allowing us to understand what that person is feeling or doing. Consequently, to don a mask could mean taking social mimicry out of the equation, stripping us of our ability to empathize.

According to The Guardian article 'The eyes have it: communication and face masks' 55 percent of communication is non-verbal, and facial expressions make the better part of it. "Facial expressions are one of the most important non-verbal channels for communication," says cognitive neuroscience researcher, Christian Wallraven, in an interview with DPA news agency. Charles Darwin posited in his 1872 book 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals', that the ability to read facial expressions likely conferred upon us an evolutionary competitive edge. The ability to read emotions from faces facilitates social interaction, reduce misunderstandings and allows communities to function efficiently and harmoniously.

In BBC article 'How face masks affect our communication', Royal Holloway University of London, psychologist Rebecca Brewer comments that people process faces as a whole, rather than focusing on individual features and that inability to see the whole face disrupts this holistic process. In fact, in 'Shades of emotion: What the addition of sunglasses or masks to faces reveals about the development of facial expression processing,' D. Roberso, et al finds that partial covering of faces, eyes and mouth in particularly, influences the accuracy and speed with which emotions are recognised.

Certain facial feature can communicate certain emotions especially well, according to the BBC article. Because the eyes and mouth are the most expressive, they tend to be the most informative regions as well. In fact, the greatest conduit of non-verbal information is the mouth, points out Wallraven. The mouth conveys feelings of happiness and its concealment can come off as unapproachable. Bored Panda article 'US Doctors Paste Photos Of Them Smiling On Their Protective Suits To Reassure COVID-19 Patients', details how US doctors have circumvented this problem with an ingenious fix, as the title suggests.

Muslims have been doing it for years, so what's the big deal? Deputy dean for international affairs at the faculty of life sciences at Humboldt University of Berlin, Researcher Ursula Hess, comments in Scientific American article 'From behind the Coronavirus Mask, an Unseen Smile Can Still Be Heard', that face occlusion does not necessarily impair people’s ability to recognize emotional expressions, because a smile can be just as successfully conveyed through the eyes. This is true for most Muslim women who opt to wear niqabs. However, Hess admitted that certain emotions such as fear and surprise maybe lost on us if the mouth is obscured.

The BBC article points out that a partially covered face should prove no obstacle for communication as long as you have access to the rest of the coordinated package of cues; hand gestures, body language, words, pitch and tone. The article points out that we may have to train our eyes to be more expressive. University of Massachusetts Amherst, professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences, Susan Krauss Whitbourne also advises to let your eyes do the talking. In fact, enhanced eye contact maybe a positive by-product of the COVID-19 tragedy.

Italians who are notorious for their unabashed eye contact maybe at an advantage here, however, wearing face masks can be specially problematic in regions like Western Europe where direct eye contact with strangers is often considered rude. In London, for example, prolonged eye contact is considered awkward, even among acquaintances. According to The Guardian article, British people look at each other only 30 to 60 percent of the time when talking.

Deutsche Welle article 'Look into my eyes: Communication in the era of face masks' points out that in many Asian cultures as well 'dropping the gaze' is considered polite and women are particularly taught from a young age to limit facial expressions and body language in public, somewhat similar to traditional Sinhala culture. Besides, even in the animal world direct eye contact is a sign of threat or interest. And if you don't mean either and are forced to maintain prolonged eye contact because you're hard put to interpret what the others maybe thinking, you'll probably get into trouble. "Everyone is trying to renegotiate their social world and it will take a while for all of this to settle down," warns Dr. Whitbourne in a blog entry.

According to The Guardian article, looking into someone's eyes produces a chemical called phenylethylamine, to help the brain come to terms with the overwhelming awareness of looking at another conscious being in the eye. This physiological response is what makes us blush. In 1997, Arthur Aron, professor of psychology at the State University of New York, made love in a lab, literally, by making two strangers ask and answer increasingly personal questions and then stair into each other's eyes for four minutes. Six months later they wound up married.

Kamin Mohammadi in her The Guardian article 'The eyes have it: communication and face masks' opines that the mask wearing may lead not only to a rash of marriages, but greater empathy and compassion. Of course playful eye contact flirtations are an added advantage. Besides, as Shakespeare put it, "the eyes are the windows to the soul" and at least we are not compelled to cover them.

(SP)