One unexpected side effect of wearing a face mask: it can be hard to read facial expressions
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff, and thanks for joining us for another Plain English lesson. I do sincerely appreciate that you choose to spend a part of your week listening to me in English, I think that’s really great. JR is the producer and he has posted the full lesson online at PlainEnglish.com/339.
Coming up today: Face masks are essential for public health during these times of coronavirus. But they can make communication difficult—and not just because it’s hard to hear someone talking with a mask on. They block our facial expressions. So on today’s lesson, we’ll talk about how we communicate with our faces—and how we can compensate for having half our faces covered up. The expression is “get away with” and JR has a song of the week.
Face masks and non-verbal communication
Wearing cloth or paper face masks is now the norm in dozens of countries around the world: it’s essential to stop the spread of the coronavirus. For many of us, and I’ll count myself in that, it’s our first time wearing a protective face mask in public. The physical sensation of wearing a mask was strange at first, but most people can get used to that in just a few weeks. The harder adjustment, though, is interpersonal relationships. Wearing a mask can make it hard to connect with other people—colleagues, good friends, and even strangers.
A mask presents two principal barriers to communication: first, it’s harder to understand someone’s voice clearly; and second, it’s much more difficult to read facial expressions.
Voices come out muffled, so speakers strain to be heard and listeners strain to understand. That usually means that speakers talk louder than normal, and their words lose some of the intonation that conveys meaning. Speech is full of meaning. The most direct form of meaning comes through words, but people communicate emotions through intonation, too. Intonation can turn a genuine sentence sarcastic; it can add empathy or surprise; it can warn another person to be careful: in short, intonation can increase the power of our words. The trouble is, it’s harder to add the right emotion to your voice when you’re speaking loudly: just try expressing empathy or understanding at a high volume. It’s almost impossible.
Individuals with hearing problems read lips and facial expressions more than others. About five percent of the world’s population suffers from hearing loss. Reading lips and facial expressions also helps when understanding conversation in a second language.
Even more than our voices, our faces tell a rich story. Scientists say that humans are the only animals that rely heavily on facial expressions to communicate. In fact, people place more reliance on what they see rather than in what they hear.
One study found that when there’s a difference in meaning between the words that are spoken and the facial expressions of the speaker, people believe the facial expressions and not the words. Facial expressions are harder to fake.
Take your smile, for example. I don’t know about you, but I cannot fake a smile. I’ve given up trying: it just doesn’t look good. If you catch me smiling, then you know the emotion is real. And the emotion behind a smile isn’t just happiness. Studies have shown that there are 19 different types of smiles. A smile is most often associated with happiness, but only six of the 19 types of smiles convey forms of happiness. Others convey fear, embarrassment, pain, skepticism, disbelief, and other emotions.
But face masks obscure so much of this communication, and they can have detrimental side effects. Effectively reading a smile or other facial expression helps humans know whom to trust. It stands to reason, then, that if we can’t read facial expressions, it’s harder to build trust with strangers. Superficial or transactional interactions are probably unaffected. Being masked as you shop for groceries or get a haircut is inconvenient, but probably doesn’t have much effect on the outcome. However, other interactions are more important.
For example, a 2013 study sought to measure whether patients perceived doctors differently if those doctors wore protective face masks when speaking. The result? Patients had less trust in doctors that wore face masks. That’s because sincerity, trustworthiness and good intentions are communicated non-verbally.
So if we know that face masks are blocking more than just our germs, is there anything we can do to compensate for this barrier to communication?
Here are a few tips for communicating while wearing a mask. Some of these, by the way, come from women who wear face coverings in public for religious reasons—they’re already a step ahead of the rest of us.
First, pay close attention to your voice. Make sure you’re speaking loud enough, and try to accentuate the words you want to emphasize, even more than you would normally do. It can sometimes feel uncomfortable to purposely speak with more vocal inflection than you’re used to. But you can probably get away with much more vocal inflection than you think you can.
Next, think about when you’re not talking. A conversation is fluid when everyone knows when they can talk. Believe it or not , you often take your clue to jump into a conversation from the other person’s lips. If your conversation partner can’t read your lips, he or she won’t know when it’s okay to talk. So you can pause more often to give the other person permission to take a turn in the conversation.
You can also use gestures and body language more than normal. You can give an animated wave, a thumbs-up, a raised eyebrow, an outstretched hand. Raise your eyebrows and open your eyes wide to communicate a smile.
In a business or more formal setting, be more explicit with your words. Don’t assume the other person knows when you’re being sarcastic, or when you’re making a joke. I know jokes aren’t as funny when you have to over-explain them, but it’s better to over-communicate with words than to be misunderstood.
A lost smile…
I’ll tell you why I wrote about this. I was at the gym the other day—the gym and the grocery store are the only two places I go—and on my way out, I said thank you to the people at the front desk. The words, “thank you,” by themselves, just the words, are almost meaningless because they’re so common. People say “thank you” when they don’t mean it, or because they feel they have to say it.
But I was being genuine and was smiling beneath my mask—and I realized that nobody was there to see that smile. So I started saying thank you and waving, which is not something I would ever do pre-mask. And that’s how I got to thinking about this topic—my smile was getting lost.
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