Study Survey

CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN THE STUDY
This study is being conducted by us to investigate the impact of wearing face masks on facial expressions. The purpose of this study is to determine if wearing a face mask interferes with understanding or perceiving emotions of the mask-wearer by others. As part of this study, you are being shown a number of pictures from volunteer models who are 18 years or older and who are wearing face masks while expressing various emotions (happy, neutral and sad) and you are being asked to rate if you think each person has happy, neutral or sad expression.
Your participation in this study is expected to assist us in determining if and how wearing masks could interfere with communicating with others, paving the way to further research and investigation to improve human communications and interactions while wearing facial masks.
We do not believe that your participation in this study is likely to lead to any unreasonable or extra risks to you. Since the participants need to access the website via the the internet, there is some risk that is present whenever someone accesses the internet (e.g. malware attacks, identity theft, etc), but we do not believe our website-hosted survey poses any extra risks compared to most other websites you might visit and additionally, our website uses encrypted communication over the internet (HTTPS). Since we collect some person information from the participants, there is also the potential risk of inadvertent disclosure of the collected personal information (name, gender, age, email address), but we will ensure to minimize the risk by safeguarding and securely storing the collected data privately, and not disclosing the names or other identifying information in our study reports (using subject IDs instead), and destroying the personal identifiers at the completion of the study.
Your data collected by us is limited to your name, age, gender, optional email address, responses to each rating and the IP address of your device when doing the ratings. Your identity and any contact info will remain confidential. You ratings, age and gender info will be completely anonymized and de-identified (meaning that your identifying information will be removed) and analyzed to determine the overall success rate of rating each pictures, as well as any possible correlations between age or gender of the rater or other potential factors (e.g. type/color of the masks, gender of the person wearing masks) and successful ratings. The results of the study will be publicly presented in scientific venues, publications or other venues/medias, but no information identifying you or your participation in this study shall be disclosed and your participation in this study will remain confidential.
Please note that if you are under 18 years of age (or under legal age as defined by your local laws), you are required to discuss your participation in this study with your parent or legal guardian and only participate in this study if both you and your parent/legal guardian agree to do so.

Please rate the pictures below and indicate if you think they are happy, neutral or sad. There are 3 pictures with different expressions from each model, for a total of 21 pictures.

(We thank our models for volunteering for this study!)