Wearing face masks reflect one of the essential means to prevent the transmission of respiratory diseases, so also in times of COVID-19. Although acceptance of such masks increases in the Western hemisphere, we lose also lose facial information about our counterparts in terms of identity, expression and other visual cues. Here we employed an experimental study with 12 base faces showing 6 different emotional states (angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, neutral sad) in which participants (N=41, calculated by an a priori power test; random sample; healthy persons of different ages, 18-87 years) assessed the emotion plus a confidence of their assessment. We revealed that emotional reading is largely hampered by covering a face with a mask resulting in lower accuracy and confidence in the own assessment. We detected specific confusion of emotional assessments, most pronouncedly shown by misinterpreting disgusted faces as being angry and assessing many other emotions (e.g. happy, sad and angry). Countermeasures have to be employed to compensate for the loss of directly available visual information from faces by increasing and explicitly using further way of communication (e.g. body language, gesture and verbal communication).