Assessment of the recognition of emotional facial expressions during old age. Implication in the use of masks

Introduction: the recognition of emotions allows humans to adapt to their social environment, allowing for communicative exchange, social inclusion, and the integral well-being of people. Especially for those older adults who are institutionalized. In fact, following the containment measures since COVID-19, the mandatory use of masks in health centers and nursing homes has been established, which implies a change in the ability to understand and react to facial emotions. Objective: to assess the impact of the use of masks on the recognition of emotional facial expressions in institutionalized older adults (old age) without cognitive impairment compared to the control group (adults). Methods: to do this, we evaluated 18 older people (healthy institutionalized residents, equal to or older than 70 years) and 18 healthy controls between 19 and 67 years old using the adaptation of the faces database emotional facial expression recognition task. results: the control group's performance was significantly better in the three modalities evaluated (emotions without a mask, emotions with a surgical mask, and emotions with a fpp2 mask). conclusions: it is confirmed that older adults "old age" have difficulties interpreting emotional expressions. This fact demonstrates the peculiarities of aging regarding the progressive loss of physical and cognitive abilities to process emotions. In addition, recognizing emotions is made more difficult when part of a person's face is masked. On the other hand, it is shown that there are no differences in the recognition of emotions based on sex.