People have started wearing face masks in response to COVID-19, but it is unknown how masks may influence the facial communication of emotion. In two pre-registered studies, participants judged expressions correctly less often, correctly judged expressions more slowly, and accumulated evidence for emotion judgments more slowly, with masks vs. without masks. However, participants were still more likely to judge expressions correctly than not, with masks.
**Keywords:** facial expressions, decision making / behavioral economics, social interactions, human behavioral experiment, computational modelling
W. Craig Williams, Eisha Haque*, Becky Mai*, and Vinod Venkatraman
Center for Applied Research in Decision Making, Fox School of Business, Temple University
*These authors contributed equally to this work.
**Email:** wcraig.williams@temple.edu