Effects of facial emotion recognition on prosocial behavior of medical students in mask-obscured scenes: mediating effect of state empathy

Objective To explore the mediating effect of facial emotion recognition on prosocial behavior of medical students in mask-obscured scenes. Methods Fifty-three medical students from a medical university in Chongqing were enrolled from July to September 2023 to complete the facial emotion recognition task, the dictator gaming task and the state empathy test. Spearman correlation analysis was used to examine the correlation between mask wearing and state empathy, trait empathy and prosocial behaviours, and the PROCESS procedure was used to test the mediation of state empathy and the moderating effect of mask wearing or not. Results ① mask wearing, state empathy and prosocial behaviour were significantly correlated (P < 0.01); ②State empathy exerted mediated effect between facial emotion recognition and prosocial behavior, with the largest effect size (47%) for the relative mediating effect of sadness; ③The interaction terms of facial emotion recognition and mask wearing had a significant effect on state empathy (P < 0.05). Conclusion Facial emotion recognition can influence prosocial behavior directly and also exert indirect effect on prosocial behavior through state empathy. Compared to the condition without mask wearing, mask wearing can significantly facilitate the effect of happy, sad and neutral emotions on state empathy.