Face coverings pose difficulties for emotion recognition, but it is unclear
whether improvement in recognising emotions from the eyes is possible with
experience and whether this might be dependent on one’s autistic traits, given
the associations between high autistic traits and poorer emotion perception and
reduced gaze to the eye region. In this preregistered study, participants
completed a forced-choice emotion recognition task with photographs of eyes and
demographic questionnaires that measure their autistic traits and their
interaction frequency with others wearing face coverings at two time points:
once at the start of the face covering mandate and again 10 months later. We
found that after 10 months, individuals with high autistic traits as a cohort
recognised emotions from just the eyes better as a function of their experience
with others wearing face coverings, suggesting that emotion perception is
malleable even for those who have difficulties with emotion perception.