Why Do People Cover their Face and Mouth When Emotional?

We often see athletes and individuals in high stress, emotional situations do what Dr. Matsumoto calls a “face cover”.

But why exactly do people cover their face or mouth in emotional and stressful times?

Some individuals believe that the face cover is only a part of social communication, but Dr. Matsumoto believes that it is not.

He believes that individuals often cover their face to conceal their emotions and that it is an immediate reaction that most people cannot control.

Dr. Matsumoto also suggests that covering one’s face could also have some evolutionary basis, rooted in not letting enemies see your emotions because it could potentially be a danger to your well-being. Nonetheless, this gesture is immediate and unconscious.

Keep your eye out for this behavior and you’ll surprisingly see it fairly frequently (you may even catch yourself doing it!)

You Can Still Gain Insights

Even if someone covers their mouth, you can still gain insights into people’s emotional states. If someone covers their mouth, don’t abandon the thought that we can pick up cues in the face.

For those of you who have had our training on reading facial expressions of emotion, there’s a lot of things that go on in the upper half of the face.

Clearly you can’t see the mouth region, but you can still gather things in the upper face region.

What expressions can you see?

• The wrinkling of the disgust will give you an appearance change between the eyes at the top of the nose.
• The lifting of the upper eyelids in fear or surprise, but especially fear, is also visible.
• You can see the brow and eye movements of surprise
• You can also see inner corners of the brows going up in sadness or distress.

Learn How to Read Emotions on Masked or Covered Faces

A few years ago we launched our Masked MiX training course that will help you unmask facial expressions of emotion.

This brand new, one-of-a-kind course helps you to regain those insights about people’s emotional states.

Masked MiX will help you read facial expressions of emotion and microexpressions on masked faces, know which facial emotions are visible and which are not, and label emotions quickly and accurately on masked faces.