As mask mandates started to disappear, I found myself dreading showing my whole face again. It takes considerable mental effort for me to choose the "correct" facial expression, and masks hide a conspicuous twitch in the corner of my mouth. Perhaps ironically, masks made me feel more confident in public and more willing to engage with strangers at e.g. the grocery store.
I found myself more comfortable walking around grocery stores as I was more free to lick my lips, talk quietly to myself, mouth curse words when I couldn't find the spice I needed, etc. I could extend a little of my home life to public life without disturbing my fellow humans.
Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old.
IMO masks are severely harming social and interpersonal development of young children, but any suggestion of removing the masks creates shit storm of controversy. The solution seems to be online learning, but it’s worth noting that a major group pushing for masks in school (teachers) are the same pushing online teaching. IMO That’s a disingenuous conflict of interest, but since pediatricians are also pushing masks for children in school, what’s the solution here? Maybe the solution is to create little plastic enclosed boxes so no child gets within 3 feet or 4 feet of another child. Everyone is surrounded by plastic like they are Hannibal Lecter, but at least they can see the smile on each other’s face…
> IMO masks are severely harming social and interpersonal development of young children, but any suggestion of removing the masks creates shit storm of controversy.
That's because serious illnesses which are easily transmitted can severely harm social and interpersonal development.
Yes, kids do mostly OK with covid, but their parents and other close contacts may not. If wearing masks brings the risk level down enough to have school in person, that's probably better than online school without masks.
We're still talking about a little piece of cloth, right? It still amazes me that people are willing to have [presumably other] people die over such a small thing. There are veterans who went off to war and died for their country, but these days, people are not even willing to so much as wear a piece of cloth. All in service of this nebulous concept of "being normal".
Do we require the same of people who are overweight and refuse to lose weight to achieve a healthy BMI? What about people who have risky sex? No health resources as they're dying of AIDS?
> Its not only about me. Plenty of people do not like mask.
Look, I don't like wearing masks either. They often hurt my ears, and my glasses fog up depending on conditions, and they're uncomfortable in many other ways. Some of these things could probably be fixed, but mostly I enjoy being a hermit, so I can deal with it.
But, I really don't like all of the negative consequences of uncontrolled community spread worse. If the ICUs are full and I get an injury or other illness that needs ICU treatment, that's not going to be good for me. If the funeral homes are overbooked and I die, my corpse may linger for months before it rests.
If it's too dangerous for my kid to go to school in person, I'm going to have to hear more of the most awful video conferences ever this year. I thought work VC was terrible when I had to do a couple hours a week, it's much worse when all of the participants are using home networking, and nobody has a decent connection and everyone has their volume at max and are yelling; I like that a whole hell of a lot less than wearing a mask.
My personal threshold? I could do this forever. I don't think that's likely though, because a whole lot of other people have a much lower threshold. It might be a good idea during flu season, though, and I think we'll see some people adopt that as a new habit.
As I understand it, in my jurisdiction, the specific, quantitative criteria is a majority of the votes of the local school board, provided a quorum (3) is attending a meeting; assuming no other level of government has provided otherwise.
That's specific and quantitative, and not really subject to change if we ignore outside government actions; but of course, it doesn't really answer your question. I don't know what their criteria are, although they have discussed some at times, but the criteria have changed over time, and the measurements have all sorts of problems too.
People don’t like masks, got it. People don’t like seatbelts either. In both cases, society pays the cost. But at the same time, these rugged freedom fighters crusading for a false sense of individualism have no issue with reaping the benefits of living in a well-funded society full of services, full of people that care about other’s well being.
I think there might be assumption made that everyone who wears masks likes it. I don’t like it. But it’s easy, and I like taking simple measures that help keep my family and community safe.
Like a seatbelt, a simple tool that is easy to use and saves lives. Also like a seatbelt, not using it places a potential burden on those around you.
Masks are far more annoying than seatbelts. I got vaccinated. I don’t mind wearing the mask in stores. But wearing it in a social environment does significantly alter the experience for the worse, in my opinion.
Why don’t we pay people to get vaccinated? And mandate that employers allow people to take days off if they are sick for a bit after the shot?
Maybe the solution is to accept that living is a risky proposition and we are OK with a minimal amount of risk in exchange for everything (normal) life has to offer.
I'm perfectly fine with that. I'll take my chances, they're pretty damn high.
Also, "risky life" is not exactly how I'd qualify being OK with living with a virus with 99.9% survival rate, I'm not talking about wingsuit jumping here
This is yet another "controversy" that I don't get. We're very strict about our children (and ourselves) wearing masks during public activities and around any people we know to be unvaccinated (i.e. other kids).
Our kids still see other people's faces all the time. They see our faces, they see other kid's faces during meals / snacks, they see adult faces from a slight distance when we're outside.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. We're trying for curious conversation here—not cross-examination.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. (Note also the one about not using uppercase for emphasis—it may seem like a minor point but it affects the threads too.)
People are generally incredibly bad at reading others' emotions anyway; if masks push us far enough towards actually realizing that fact, maybe it's on the whole a good thing.
If it doesn't matter, don't worry about it--and if it does matter, just ask! You don't need to be able to guess someone's emotions from their face for society to function.
I have some friends who have talked about feeling like they can't trust the people around them when everyone is wearing masks.
This has not been my experience – I suspect I've always relied on body language at least as much as facial cues, and that other people wearing masks doesn't deprive me of as much information as it does for many others.
This may be common to other introverts: I tend to make my greetings, rather than verbally, with some kind of facial expression. Fortunately for me during the pandemic, I was pretty decent at the mime stuff and other physically emotive arts, so I have not been too impacted. I have noticed that I have been using my body and my (I am told "expressive") hands quite a bit to compensate.
I wonder how much of that will stick around out of habit when we are eventually done with masks.
Man it was back to school night for my youngest daughter last night. We visited with her new teacher for a few minutes. The teacher asked her, "Are you excited to be going back to school?"
I think my daughter was glad she was wearing a mask at that moment. Probably she'll have to wear that mask to school for most of the school year. I'd hate to be a teacher trying to figure out what my kids were actually thinking.
I see absolutely no reason to believe that, and plenty of reason to think it's total bunk. E.g., blind children exist, and they are not psychologically damaged by not being able to read faces.
In fact, let's go ahead and just look at the actual Conclusion section:
To conclude, here, we showed that mask use influences our ability to infer facial expressions at any age.
Yes, duh. We're not good at it anyway. (They claim that people are doing good when they get above 66% of judgments correct--still a D grade.)
Furthermore, we showed that the human capacity to read emotions from facial configurations when a face mask is present becomes particularly reduced in toddlers. We suggested that this is related to different age-related developmental stages of face processing associated with emotional reasoning.
Yeah, not surprising. But toddlers still get most of their social input from their families, so the most impacted group is also the group we need be least concerned about.
Such observation poses the question whether a privation of facial visual features, as the one we are experiencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, might alter or delay the development of social skills associated with face perception in early childhood.
It poses the question. That's it. They have no evidence that there actually is any alteration to social skills, and no evidence that that would be a bad or disabling thing if there were.
Designing devices for personal protection that allows visibility of the lower part of the face may be crucial in all environments important for developing social and interaction skills in children, such as in education or rehabilitation, especially for those suffering from sensory or cognitive deficits.
Sure, that seems like a good idea. But it's not an excuse to not wear a mask if you can't get a transparent one.
Knowledge from the current study can inform emotion-centered interventions and prevention programs that aim to foster socio-emotional processes linked to emotional understanding (Izard et al., 2008).
Yes, it absolutely can.
So, that's what it actually says. It very clearly does not say that kids will be psychologically damaged by not being able to see the lower halves of other people's faces in public, and it does not make any attempt to account for social learning in the home.
All that it claims is that it may impact their social skills. They hypothesize that masks may cause social development delays, and they measure that masks make it harder to judge emotions, but they do not actually tie that hypothesis to their research, and they have no justification that the hypothesized changes to social skills would actually be problematic--which is not at all given, since what counts as "good social skills" is heavily dependent on culture.
Only funny thing about this is that masks can actually be useful for hiding emotions like for example laughing at your college professors or at your boss.
while I don't like wearing the mask in general, I do like that it helps me since I have a "resting asshole face." A major reason why I preferred working remote before the pandemic.
the number one concern I've had with regards to face masks, above and beyond all else, has been the cognitive development of children growing up in these times. I'm no behavioral psychologist or whatever but surely concealing the facial expressions of adults and other children isn't going to be very good for young children passively learning how to intuitively emote and show emotion in facial expressions! I realized this when I was working retail earlier this year and recognized that I could no longer smile at small children while masked. I'm afraid that a lot of decisions made in the past couple years are going to have unforeseen nth-order effects that won't become fully apparent until later on.
no thanks! I live in South Dakota and haven't worn a mask since the school system I work in lifted the mask mandate at the start of July, and before that I only wore it in the lobby of my building. everything's going great here! the bottom floors of my building are a YMCA daycare and I get to smile at and greet many unmasked small children every day, it gives me a tiny bit of joy coming and going from work. I appreciate the unsolicited instruction though, and the kids will in fact be fine.
The way that neurotypical Americans currently use facial expressions for public social interaction isn't set in stone, inherent to humanity, or essential to normal development. It is a collection of accidental cultural practices, which are not shared throughout the world right now and will change in the future anyway. So, something might be speeding up the evolution of our cultural conventions right now--so what?
The OP didn't even say they were American, and the choice isn't between current facial expressive norms and different ones, it's limiting the ability of children to read the most expressive part of our faces entirely.
Doesn't matter. The same argument applies regardless of where you live.
the choice isn't between current facial expressive norms and different ones, it's limiting the ability of children to read the most expressive part of our faces entirely.
So what if it is? I see no evidence that that is actually a problem. It is only a problem if you assume that we must maintain current social norms; otherwise, you can just update social norms to not depend on error-prone interpretation of faces in public. Congenitally blind people develop just fine without ever seeing any faces at all--and nobody is saying you have to stay masked 24/7 in the privacy of our own home, so it's not like seeing children are deprived of any and all facial stimulation anyway.
Valid concerns, however -- we do not wear masks for no reason. There is another danger -- that we did not choose -- that the masks are aiding against. We have no good choice perhaps -- only one that is less bad -- the question to answer is which is which. Will the children take more harm from missing faces, or from sickness and deaths?
>Will the children take more harm from missing faces, or from sickness and deaths?
They will take more harm from missing faces because their psychological development depends on reading face emotions. Covid death rate among children is extremely low but they can spread it to their parents are grandparents tho.
After this pandemic is all gone and done why don't we all wear Guy Fawkes masks for the rest of the life if faces don't matter as you imply. Maybe that way we can preserve our privacy and fight CCTV surveillance.
After this pandemic is all gone and done why don't we all wear Guy Fawkes masks for the rest of the life if faces don't matter as you imply. Maybe that way we can preserve our privacy and fight CCTV surveillance.
You say that as if it's a joke, but...
Yeah. Let's do it. I am 100% down for that. If I want you to recognize me, I'll wear a name tag, and if I want you to know how I'm feeling I'll tell you.
Can't be any worse than what the Internet has already done to society. People in the younger generations, in developed countries, had stopped acting like human beings even before COVID hit.
