Facemasks reduce face trustworthiness perceived by deaf individuals

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most people wore facemasks to protect themselves and others. Whilst this was recommendable, unfortunately facemasks represented a critical problem for deaf people by preventing lipreading. Moreover, the mouth region represents a crucial source of information for inferring emotional states as well as for visually-based social first impressions. An interesting question is whether facemasks impact on social inferences, such as trustworthiness judgments, in a similar vein in deaf and hearing individuals. Our results showed that overall deaf individuals performed similarly to hearing controls in the evaluation of different levels of trustworthiness of computer-generated faces manipulated for trustworthiness. However, deaf individuals judged faces with facemasks to be overall less trustworthy than hearing participants. We interpret this result as suggesting that, for deaf individuals, occluding the mouth area prevents the processing of perceptual information from mouthing and mouth gestures, thus blocking a holistic representation of the face, which in turn hinders communication and limits social exchanges for deaf individuals.