| Popis: |
During the COVID-19 pandemic, government-mandated protection measures such as contact restrictions and mask wearing significantly affected social interactions. In the current preregistered study we hypothesized that such measures could influence self-reported mood and the ability to recognize emotional expressions from the eye region of faces. We found that mood was positively related to face-to-face but not to virtual interactions. This suggests that contact restrictions leading to a decrease in face-to-face compared to virtual interactions may be related to negative mood. We also found slight improvements in emotion recognition from the eyes in a student sample tested during the pandemic relative to a comparable sample tested prior to the pandemic although these differences were restricted to female participants. |
