Attention biases in facial emotion processing in refugee and nonrefugee children revealed using eye tracking

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Solicited Content: Refugee Children

Abstract

Around half of the 26 million refugees in the world are children (UNHCR, 2020). Their experiences of war and displacement can have profound effects on their affective development and mental health (Chen et al., 2019; Herzog & Schmahl, 2019). Previous studies suggest that children who experience early adversity, such as childhood abuse, show attentional biases towards negative emotional expressions (Pollak, 2012). However, it is unclear whether these attentional biases towards negative affective stimuli are also present in refugee children.

Here, we examined attentional biases in Syrian refugee (n=31, average age 9.5) and Jordanian nonrefugee children (n=55, average age 9.9) living in Amman. Children freely viewed pictures of a person expressing 4 different emotions: angry, happy, sad, and neutral on a computer whilst their eye movements were recorded. Male and female child and adult faces from the Radbound Faces Database (Langner et al., 2010) and the Child Affective Facial Expression Set (LoBue & Trasher, 2015) were used. Children completed 32 trials with adult and child faces separately and we extracted their first fixations and dwell time on the different emotional expressions. Trauma (Panter-Brick et al., 2009) and mental health outcomes (PTSD (Perrin et al., 2005), anxiety and depression (Mahfoud et al., 2011), insecurity and distress (Ziadni et al., 2011)) were measured using previously validated questionnaires, as well as participants’ poverty levels and their relationship with parents (Barber et al., 2012).

Although refugee children experienced significantly more trauma than nonrefugee children, the children did not differ on any mental health measures, level of poverty, or parent-child relationship quality. We also found no differences in the eye gaze patterns when the children looked at child or adult faces. We found that both refugee and nonrefugee children displayed an avoidance of angry and happy emotional expressions, as evidenced by significantly shorter dwell time on those faces. Both refugee and nonrefugee children’s first fixations were most often on the sad faces. However, when viewing children’s faces, nonrefugee children’s first fixation was on angry expressions more frequently than refugee children. When looking at the relationship between psychopathology and eye movements, we find a significant positive correlation between trauma scores and dwell time on angry expressions, where higher trauma was indicative of longer dwell duration on angry faces. We also find that children with higher insecurity scores dwelled longer on angry expressions when viewing child faces.

Overall, we find that both refugee and nonrefugee children tend to avoid angry expressions. This runs contrary to the majority of eye tracking findings in children suffering from abuse and maltreatment and may reflect the substantive differences between these types of early adversity and war trauma, as well as the important role of current living conditions in affective development.

Authors

• Julia Ewa Michalek, Queen Mary University of London
  Presenting Author

• Matteo Lisi, University of Essex
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin Hadfield, Trinity College Dublin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Rana Dajani, Hashemite University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Isabelle Mareschal, Queen Mary University of London
  Non-Presenting Author