The Problem of Identifying a Person in a Face Masking Situation

The article is dedicated to studying of psychological problems of recognizing a person by his/her face during the investigative action of presenting for identification. According to the result of the theoretical analysis it was found that the problem of recognizing a person in conditions of intentional face masking has not been practically studied despite of a number of research works on the problem of identifying a person by his/her face. An empirical study was conducted on a sample of young people at the age of 18-20 years old in the city of Yelets. Three hundred people participated in three stages of the experiment. The two types of images were used as motivation: a real appearance and an appearance with elements of disguise in which it was difficult to recognize the original face. The two initial hypotheses were proved: 1) the possibility of identification in a situation of intentional face masking depends on the preliminary installation of the recognizer; 2) the most effective installation during identifying of a person in a situation of intentional face masking is to fix the signs of the upper part of the face and to generalize psychological image of an identifiable person. Both hypotheses were successfully proved.

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