Social cognition in refugee children: an experimental cross-sectional study of emotional processing with Syrian families in Turkish communities

Gredebäck, Gustaf; Haas, Sara; Hall, Jonathan; Pollak, Seth D.; Karakus, Dogukan Cansin; Lindskog, Marcus

doi:10.1098/rsos.210362

Cited by 10 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 44 publications

(70 reference statements)

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“…Other work has shown that a mother’s overemphasis on negative emotions, such as anger, can interfere with the mother’s capacity to accurately read the infant’s emotional state and regulatory needs ( Rosenblum et al, 2006 ). Such an environment has been shown to disrupt the development of age-appropriate attentional mechanisms and lead to either an increased sensitivity to negative emotions in children from aversive environments ( Pollak and Kistler, 2002 ; Pollak and Sinha, 2002 ) or a general decrease in the ability to process and identify emotional facial expressions during childhood ( Forslund et al, 2017 ; Gredebäck, et al, 2021 ). We know that infants are expert face processors toward their primary caregiver’s face due to their reliance in the first year of life on facial information and cues, such as emotional expression and eye gaze ( Posner et al, 2014 ; Rennels et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Infants’ Selective Visual Attention Is Dependent on Maternal Affect and Emotional Context

2021

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Development of selective attention during the first year of life is critical to cognitive and socio-emotional skills. It is also a period that the average child’s interactions with their mother dominate their social environment. This study examined how maternal negative affect and an emotion face prime (mother/stranger) jointly effect selective visual attention. Results from linear mixed-effects modeling showed that 9-month olds (N=70) were faster to find a visual search target after viewing a fearful face (regardless of familiarity) or their mother’s angry face. For mothers with high negative affect, infants’ attention was further impacted by fearful faces, resulting in faster search times. Face emotion interacted with mother’s negative affect, demonstrating a capacity to influence what infants attend in their environment.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another reason the faces were blurred (as opposed to, e.g., scrambled) was for ecological validity. In real life situations, facial emotional expressions are often identified based on partial or suboptimal information and may generalize better to their ability in real life situations (see Forslund et al, 2017 ; Gredebäck, et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ Selective Visual Attention Is Dependent on Maternal Affect and Emotional Context

2021

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“…In a recent exception to this Western-oriented research, [11] showed that among Syrian families living in Konya, Turkey, mothers' post-traumatic stress impacted children's emotional processing. Research with refugees have further demonstrated that stressful conditions, together with parental mental health problems, have a negative impact on the quality of parent-child interactions and attachment [6,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Mothers serve as the primary caregivers of children in Middle-Eastern families, and especially the mother-related factors have been found to impact child development in waraffected areas [6,7] Maternal mental health and caring are associated with relational problems and social withdrawal [8], psychiatric symptoms [9], sensorimotor and language development [10], and lower educational attainment [5] of a child. [11] showed that mothers', but not fathers', posttraumatic stress is related to children's emotional processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…The goal of this paper is to examine: (1) which discipline types are associated with children's emotional processing competence; (2) whether these discipline types moderate the impact of maternal traumatic stress on child emotional processing (either by supporting or reducing emotional processing) and (3) which maternal factors are associated with the use of those discipline types that support the healthy development of children's emotional processing. To accomplish this goal, we combine cross-sectional experimental and questionnaire data from 394 individuals (representing 100 Syrian refugee families) living in Turkish communities (the same dataset previously used [11]). We measure children's emotional processing and relate it to mothers' self-reports of war-related post-traumatic stress and discipline types.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of maternal trauma and discipline types in emotional processing among Syrian refugee children

Peltonen

Gredebäck

Pollak

et al. 2022

Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry

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Stressful experiences in armed conflict incur intergenerational effects through parental behaviors with their children. A recent study reported that among Syrian refugee families, mothers’ (but not fathers’) post-traumatic stress (PTS) impacted children’s emotional processing. In this study, we aim to shed further light on this phenomenon by analyzing how the parenting practices in the context of post-traumatic stress confers protection or risk for children’s emotional processing. Participants were 6–18-year-old children (n = 212) and their mothers (n = 94), who fled from Syria and were residing in Turkish communities. We used the computer-based emotional processing task including photos of facial movements typically associated with different emotions to measure children’s capacity for emotional processing. Mothers reported their PTS and the discipline types they use, as well as the contextual factors related to their refugee background. Linear mixed effect models were constructed first, to find out the discipline types that are most strongly associated with emotional processing of the child, and second, to examine whether these discipline types moderate the effect of maternal PTS on children's emotional processing. Finally, generalized linear models were constructed to examine which contextual factors are associated with the use of these discipline types by mothers. We found that spanking as a discipline type was associated with poorer child emotional processing, whereas withholding of media access was associated with better emotional processing. Younger and less religious mothers were more prone to use spanking. The study underlines the need for parenting programs alongside with efforts to address mental health issues among mothers living under armed conflict.

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Maternal Trauma and Psychopathology Symptoms Affect Refugee Children’s Mental Health But Not Their Emotion Processing

Michalek,

Qtaishat,

von Stumm

et al. 2024

Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol

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Refugee children’s development may be affected by their parents’ war-related trauma exposure and psychopathology symptoms across a range of cognitive and affective domains, but the processes involved in this transmission are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the impact of refugee mothers’ trauma exposure and mental health on their children’s mental health and attention biases to emotional expressions. In our sample of 324 Syrian refugee mother-child dyads living in Jordan (children’s Mage=6.32, SD = 1.18; 50% female), mothers reported on their symptoms of anxiety and depression, and on their children’s internalising, externalising, and attention problems. A subset of mothers reported their trauma exposure (n = 133) and PTSD symptoms (n = 124). We examined emotion processing in the dyads using a standard dot-probe task measuring their attention allocation to facial expressions of anger and sadness. Maternal trauma and PTSD symptoms were linked to child internalising and attention problems, while maternal anxiety and depression symptoms were associated with child internalising, externalising, and attention problems. Mothers and children were hypervigilant towards expressions of anger, but surprisingly, mother and child biases were not correlated with each other. The attentional biases to emotional faces were also not linked to psychopathology risk in the dyads. Our findings highlight the importance of refugee mothers’ trauma exposure and psychopathology on their children’s wellbeing. The results also suggest a dissociation between the mechanisms underlying mental health and those involved in attention to emotional faces, and that intergenerational transmission of mental health problems might involve mechanisms other than attentional processes relating to emotional expressions.

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Social cognition in refugee children: an experimental cross-sectional study of emotional processing with Syrian families in Turkish communities

Cited by 10 publications

References 44 publications

Infants’ Selective Visual Attention Is Dependent on Maternal Affect and Emotional Context

Infants’ Selective Visual Attention Is Dependent on Maternal Affect and Emotional Context

The role of maternal trauma and discipline types in emotional processing among Syrian refugee children

Maternal Trauma and Psychopathology Symptoms Affect Refugee Children’s Mental Health But Not Their Emotion Processing

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