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

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.

Facial emotion recognition in refugee children with a history of war trauma.

Over 36 million children are currently displaced due to war, yet we know little about how these experiences of war and displacement affect their socioemotional development-notably how they perceive facial expressions. Across three different experiments, we investigated the effects of war trauma exposure on facial emotion recognition in Syrian refugee (n = 130, Mage = 9.3 years, 63 female) and Jordanian nonrefugee children (n = 148, Mage = 9.4 years, 66 female) living in Jordan (data collected 2019-2020). Children in the two groups differed in trauma exposure, but not on any of our measures of mental health. In Experiment 1, we measured children's biases to perceive an emotion using morphed facial expressions and found no evidence that biases differed between refugees and nonrefugees. In Experiment 2, we adapted a novel perceptual scaling task that bypasses semantic knowledge, and again found no differences between the two group's discrimination of facial expressions. Finally, in Experiment 3, we recorded children's eye movements as they identified Middle Eastern actors' facial expressions, and again found no differences between the groups in either their identification accuracies or scanning strategies. Taken together, our results suggest that exposure to war-related trauma and displacement during early development, when reported by the caregiver but not always recollected by the child, does not appear to alter emotion recognition of facial expressions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Genetic algorithms reveal identity independent representation of emotional expressions.

People readily and automatically process facial emotion and identity, and it has been reported that these cues are processed both dependently and independently. However, this question of identity independent encoding of emotions has only been examined using posed, often exaggerated expressions of emotion, that do not account for the substantial individual differences in emotion recognition. In this study, we ask whether people's unique beliefs of how emotions should be reflected in facial expressions depend on the identity of the face. To do this, we employed a genetic algorithm where participants created facial expressions to represent different emotions. Participants generated facial expressions of anger, fear, happiness, and sadness, on two different identities. Facial features were controlled by manipulating a set of weights, allowing us to probe the exact positions of faces in high-dimensional expression space. We found that participants created facial expressions belonging to each identity in a similar space that was unique to the participant, for angry, fearful, and happy expressions, but not sad. However, using a machine learning algorithm that examined the positions of faces in expression space, we also found systematic differences between the two identities' expressions across participants. This suggests that participants' beliefs of how an emotion should be reflected in a facial expression are unique to them and identity independent, although there are also some systematic differences in the facial expressions between two identities that are common across all individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Influence of prior knowledge on eye movements to scenes as revealed by hidden Markov models.

Human visual experience usually provides ample opportunity to accumulate knowledge about events unfolding in the environment. In typical scene perception experiments, however, participants view images that are unrelated to each other and, therefore, they cannot accumulate knowledge relevant to the upcoming visual input. Consequently, the influence of such knowledge on how this input is processed remains underexplored. Here, we investigated this influence in the context of gaze control. We used sequences of static film frames arranged in a way that allowed us to compare eye movements to identical frames between two groups: a group that accumulated prior knowledge relevant to the situations depicted in these frames and a group that did not. We used a machine learning approach based on hidden Markov models fitted to individual scanpaths to demonstrate that the gaze patterns from the two groups differed systematically and, thereby, showed that recently accumulated prior knowledge contributes to gaze control. Next, we leveraged the interpretability of hidden Markov models to characterize these differences. Additionally, we report two unexpected and interesting caveats of our approach. Overall, our results highlight the importance of recently acquired prior knowledge for oculomotor control and the potential of hidden Markov models as a tool for investigating it.

Post-migration living difficulties and poor mental health associated with increased interpretation bias for threat.

Previous research has found associations between mental health difficulties and interpretation biases, including heightened interpretation of threat from neutral or ambiguous stimuli. Building on this research, we explored associations between interpretation biases (positive and negative) and three constructs that have been linked to migrant experience: mental health symptoms (Global Severity Index [GSI]), Post-Migration Living Difficulties (PMLD), and Perceived Ethnic Discrimination Questionnaire (PEDQ). Two hundred thirty students who identified as first- (n = 94) or second-generation ethnic minority migrants (n = 68), and first-generation White migrants (n = 68) completed measures of GSI, PEDQ, and PMLD. They also performed an interpretation bias task using Point Light Walkers (PLW), dynamic stimuli with reduced visual input that are easily perceived as humans performing an action. Five categories of PLW were used: four that clearly depicted human forms undertaking positive, neutral, negative, or ambiguous actions, and a fifth that involved scrambled animations with no clear action or form. Participants were asked to imagine their interaction with the stimuli and rate their friendliness (positive interpretation bias) and aggressiveness (interpretation bias for threat). We found that the three groups differed on PEDQ and PMLD, with no significant differences in GSI, and the three measured were positively correlated. Poorer mental health and increased PMLD were associated with a heightened interpretation for threat of scrambled animations only. These findings have implications for understanding of the role of threat biases in mental health and the migrant experience.

Prior knowledge about events depicted in scenes decreases oculomotor exploration.

The visual input that the eyes receive usually contains temporally continuous information about unfolding events. Therefore, humans can accumulate knowledge about their current environment. Typical studies on scene perception, however, involve presenting multiple unrelated images and thereby render this accumulation unnecessary. Our study, instead, facilitated it and explored its effects. Specifically, we investigated how recently-accumulated prior knowledge affects gaze behavior. Participants viewed sequences of static film frames that contained several 'context frames' followed by a 'critical frame'. The context frames showed either events from which the situation depicted in the critical frame naturally followed, or events unrelated to this situation. Therefore, participants viewed identical critical frames while possessing prior knowledge that was either relevant or irrelevant to the frames' content. In the former case, participants' gaze behavior was slightly more exploratory, as revealed by seven gaze characteristics we analyzed. This result demonstrates that recently-gained prior knowledge reduces exploratory eye movements.

Role of facial familiarity and emotional expression intensity in ensemble emotion perception.

When looking at groups of people, we can extract information from the different faces to derive properties of the group, such as its average facial emotion, although how this average is computed remains a matter of debate. Here, we examined whether our participants' personal familiarity with the faces in the group, as well as the intensity of the facial expressions, biased ensemble perception. Participants judged the average emotional expression of ensembles of four different identities whose expressions depicted either neutral, angry, or happy emotions. For the angry and happy expressions, the intensity of the emotion could be either low (e.g., slightly happy) or high (very happy). When all the identities in the ensemble were unfamiliar, the presence of any high intensity emotional face biased ensemble perception towards its emotion. However, when a familiar face was present in the ensemble, perception was biased towards the familiar face's emotion regardless of its intensity. These findings reveal that how we perceive the average emotion of a group is influenced by both the emotional intensity and familiarity of the faces comprising the group, supporting the idea that different faces may be weighted differently in ensemble perception. These findings have important implications for the judgements we make about a group's overall emotional state may be biased by individuals within the group.

The effects of the presence of a face and direct eye gaze on voice identity learning.

We rarely become familiar with the voice of another person in isolation but usually also have access to visual identity information, thus learning to recognize their voice and face in parallel. There are conflicting findings as to whether learning to recognize voices in audiovisual vs audio-only settings is advantageous or detrimental to learning. One prominent finding shows that the presence of a face overshadows the voice, hindering voice identity learning by capturing listeners' attention (Face Overshadowing Effect; FOE). In the current study, we tested the proposal that the effect of audiovisual training on voice identity learning is driven by attentional processes. Participants learned to recognize voices through either audio-only training (Audio-Only) or through three versions of audiovisual training, where a face was presented alongside the voices. During audiovisual training, the faces were either looking at the camera (Direct Gaze), were looking to the side (Averted Gaze) or had closed eyes (No Gaze). We found a graded effect of gaze on voice identity learning: Voice identity recognition was most accurate after audio-only training and least accurate after audiovisual training including direct gaze, constituting a FOE. While effect sizes were overall small, the magnitude of FOE was halved for the Averted and No Gaze conditions. With direct gaze being associated with increased attention capture compared to averted or no gaze, the current findings suggest that incidental attention capture at least partially underpins the FOE. We discuss these findings in light of visual dominance effects and the relative informativeness of faces vs voices for identity perception.

Walking humans and running mice: perception and neural encoding of optic flow during self-motion.

Locomotion produces full-field optic flow that often dominates the visual motion inputs to an observer. The perception of optic flow is in turn important for animals to guide their heading and interact with moving objects. Understanding how locomotion influences optic flow processing and perception is therefore essential to understand how animals successfully interact with their environment. Here, we review research investigating how perception and neural encoding of optic flow are altered during self-motion, focusing on locomotion. Self-motion has been found to influence estimation and sensitivity for optic flow speed and direction. Nonvisual self-motion signals also increase compensation for self-driven optic flow when parsing the visual motion of moving objects. The integration of visual and nonvisual self-motion signals largely follows principles of Bayesian inference and can improve the precision and accuracy of self-motion perception. The calibration of visual and nonvisual self-motion signals is dynamic, reflecting the changing visuomotor contingencies across different environmental contexts. Throughout this review, we consider experimental research using humans, non-human primates and mice. We highlight experimental challenges and opportunities afforded by each of these species and draw parallels between experimental findings. These findings reveal a profound influence of locomotion on optic flow processing and perception across species. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'New approaches to 3D vision'.

Contextualising facial expressions: The effect of temporal context and individual differences on classification.

The influence of context on facial expression classification is most often investigated using simple cues in static faces portraying basic expressions with a fixed emotional intensity. We examined (1) whether a perceptually rich, dynamic audiovisual context, presented in the form of movie clips (to achieve closer resemblance to real life), affected the subsequent classification of dynamic basic (happy) and non-basic (sarcastic) facial expressions and (2) whether people's susceptibility to contextual cues was related to their ability to classify facial expressions viewed in isolation. Participants classified facial expressions-gradually progressing from neutral to happy/sarcastic in increasing intensity-that followed movie clips. Classification was relatively more accurate and faster when the preceding context predicted the upcoming expression, compared with when the context did not. Speeded classifications suggested that predictive contexts reduced the emotional intensity required to be accurately classified. More importantly, we show for the first time that participants' accuracy in classifying expressions without an informative context correlated with the magnitude of the contextual effects experienced by them-poor classifiers of isolated expressions were more susceptible to a predictive context. Our findings support the emerging view that contextual cues and individual differences must be considered when explaining mechanisms underlying facial expression classification.

Genetic algorithms reveal profound individual differences in emotion recognition.

Emotional communication relies on a mutual understanding, between expresser and viewer, of facial configurations that broadcast specific emotions. However, we do not know whether people share a common understanding of how emotional states map onto facial expressions. This is because expressions exist in a high-dimensional space too large to explore in conventional experimental paradigms. Here, we address this by adapting genetic algorithms and combining them with photorealistic three-dimensional avatars to efficiently explore the high-dimensional expression space. A total of 336 people used these tools to generate facial expressions that represent happiness, fear, sadness, and anger. We found substantial variability in the expressions generated via our procedure, suggesting that different people associate different facial expressions to the same emotional state. We then examined whether variability in the facial expressions created could account for differences in performance on standard emotion recognition tasks by asking people to categorize different test expressions. We found that emotion categorization performance was explained by the extent to which test expressions matched the expressions generated by each individual. Our findings reveal the breadth of variability in people's representations of facial emotions, even among typical adult populations. This has profound implications for the interpretation of responses to emotional stimuli, which may reflect individual differences in the emotional category people attribute to a particular facial expression, rather than differences in the brain mechanisms that produce emotional responses.

Predictors of Literacy and Attitudes Toward Reading Among Syrian Refugee Children in Jordan.

Refugee children often face disruptions to their education before and during displacement. However, little is known about either levels or predictors of refugee children's literacy or about their attitudes toward reading in low- or middle-income countries. To address this, we conducted in-home literacy assessments using the Holistic Assessment of Learning and Development Outcomes with 322 Syrian refugee mother-child dyads who lived in Jordan (child age range 4-8 years, M = 6.32 years, 50% female). Overall, the children had quite low levels of literacy, although they indicated a strong enthusiasm for reading. Child age, maternal education, and maternal ability to read all predicted child literacy, although maternal literacy predicted it only among children enrolled in school. Among those enrolled in school (64.9% of the total sample, 88.7% of those aged ≥ 6), students attending hybrid classes had better literacy than those attending either solely in-person or solely online, although the frequency of school attendance did not predict literacy. A less consistent pattern emerged for predicting children's attitudes toward reading. Our results suggest an urgent need to improve literacy skills among refugee children in Jordan, as well as a need for validated measures of attitudes toward reading for use with Arabic-speaking youth. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13158-022-00334-x.

Emotion recognition bias depends on stimulus morphing strategy.

Emotion recognition is vital for social interactions, and atypical (or biased) emotion recognition has been linked to mental health disorders including depression and anxiety. However, biases in emotion recognition vary across studies, and it is unclear whether this reflects genuine group differences in psychological processes underlying emotion recognition or differences in methodologies. One common method to measure biases in emotion recognition involves morphing a face between two emotional expressions in different ratios and asking participants to categorise the faces as belonging to one of the two emotion categories ('direct-morphing' method). However, this method creates morphed faces that are not ecologically valid. Alternatively, faces may be morphed through a neutral expression ('morphing-through-neutral' method), which is more ecologically valid since emotional expressions usually start from a neutral face. To compare these two approaches, we measured emotion recognition biases using two morphing techniques in 136 participants who also completed measures of anxiety (GAD-7) and depression (PHQ-9). Biases obtained using the two methods differed significantly: In the direct-morphing method, participants perceived the central 50% happy/50% angry face as slightly happy, whereas in the morphing-through-neutral method the neutral face was seen as angry. There were no associations between biases and depression or anxiety scores for either morphing method. This study is the first to directly compare emotion recognition biases obtained using two different morphing methods and is a first step towards reconciling discrepancies in the literature.

Social synchronization of brain activity increases during eye-contact.

Humans make eye-contact to extract information about other people's mental states, recruiting dedicated brain networks that process information about the self and others. Recent studies show that eye-contact increases the synchronization between two brains but do not consider its effects on activity within single brains. Here we investigate how eye-contact affects the frequency and direction of the synchronization within and between two brains and the corresponding network characteristics. We also evaluate the functional relevance of eye-contact networks by comparing inter- and intra-brain networks of friends vs. strangers and the direction of synchronization between leaders and followers. We show that eye-contact increases higher inter- and intra-brain synchronization in the gamma frequency band. Network analysis reveals that some brain areas serve as hubs linking within- and between-brain networks. During eye-contact, friends show higher inter-brain synchronization than strangers. Dyads with clear leader/follower roles demonstrate higher synchronization from leader to follower in the alpha frequency band. Importantly, eye-contact affects synchronization between brains more than within brains, demonstrating that eye-contact is an inherently social signal. Future work should elucidate the causal mechanisms behind eye-contact induced synchronization.

Direct eye gaze enhances the ventriloquism effect.

The "ventriloquism effect" describes an illusory phenomenon where the perceived location of an auditory stimulus is pulled toward the location of a visual stimulus. Ventriloquists use this phenomenon to create an illusion where an inanimate puppet is perceived to speak. Ventriloquists use the expression and suppression of their own and the puppet's mouth movements as well the direction of their respective eye gaze to maximize the illusion. While the puppet's often exaggerated mouth movements have been demonstrated to enhance the ventriloquism effect, the contribution of direct eye gaze remains unknown. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an image of a person's face while hearing a temporally synchronous recording of a voice originating from different locations on the azimuthal plane. The eyes of the facial stimuli were either looking directly at participants or were closed. Participants were more likely to misperceive the location of a range of voice locations as coming from a central position when the eye gaze of the facial stimuli were directed toward them. Thus, direct gaze enhances the ventriloquist effect by attracting participants' perception of the voice locations toward the location of the face. In an exploratory analysis, we furthermore found no evidence for an other-race effect between White vs Asian listeners. In Experiment 2, we replicated the effect of direct eye gaze on the ventriloquism effect, also showing that faces per se attract perceived sound locations compared with audio-only sound localization. Showing a modulation of the ventriloquism effect by socially-salient eye gaze information thus adds to previous findings reporting top-down influences on this effect.

War-related trauma linked to increased sustained attention to threat in children.

Experiences of war and displacement can have profound effects on children's affective development and mental health, although the mechanism(s) underlying these effects remain unknown. This study investigated the link between early adversity and attention to affective stimuli using a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm with Syrian refugee (n = 31, Mage  = 9.55, 12 female) and Jordanian non-refugee (n = 55, Mage  = 9.98, 30 female) children living in Jordan (March 2020). Questionnaires assessed PTSD, anxiety/depression, insecurity, distress, and trauma. Refugee children showed greater initial avoidance of angry and happy faces compared to non-refugee children, and higher trauma exposure was linked to increased sustained attention to angry stimuli. These findings suggest that war-related trauma may have differential effects on the early and later stages of affective processing in refugee children.

Identifying criminals: No biasing effect of criminal context on recalled threat.

To date, it is still unclear whether there is a systematic pattern in the errors made in eyewitness recall and whether certain features of a person are more likely to lead to false identification. Moreover, we also do not know the extent of systematic errors impacting identification of a person from their body rather than solely their face. To address this, based on the contextual model of eyewitness identification (CMEI; Osborne & Davies, 2014, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28[3], 392-402), we hypothesized that having framed a target as a perpetrator of a violent crime, participants would recall that target person as appearing more like a stereotypical criminal (i.e., more threatening). In three separate experiments, participants were first presented with either no frame, a neutral frame, or a criminal frame (perpetrators of a violent crime) accompanying a target (either a face or body). Participants were then asked to identify the original target from a selection of people that varied in facial threat or body musculature. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no evidence of bias. However, identification accuracy was highest for the most threatening target bodies high in musculature, as well as bodies paired with detailed neutral contextual information. Overall, these findings suggest that while no systematic bias exists in the recall of criminal bodies, the nature of the body itself and the context in which it is presented can significantly impact identification accuracy.

Trust and childhood maltreatment: evidence of bias in appraisal of unfamiliar faces.

BACKGROUND: Child maltreatment is associated with poorer social functioning and increased risk of mental health problems in adolescence and adulthood, but the processes underlying these associations remain unclear. Although crucial for establishing and maintaining relationships, trust judgements have not been experimentally investigated in children who have experienced abuse and neglect. METHODS: A community-based sample of 75 children aged 8-16 years with maltreatment documented on the basis of social services records, and a group of 70 peers matched on age, gender, cognitive ability, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity took part in the study. Children completed a trustworthiness face-judgement task in which they appraised the trustworthiness of unfamiliar facial stimuli varying along a computationally modelled trustworthiness dimension. RESULTS: In line with clinical observations that childhood maltreatment is associated with an atypical pattern of trust processing, children with maltreatment experience were significantly less likely than their peers to rate unfamiliar faces as trustworthy. Moreover, they were more variable in their trust attributions than their peers. CONCLUSIONS: The study provides compelling experimental evidence that children with documented maltreatment perceive others as less trustworthy than their peers and are less consistent in their estimates of trustworthiness in others. Over time, alterations in trust processing may disrupt the development of social bonds and contribute to 'social thinning' (a reduction in the extent and quality of social relationships), leaving children more vulnerable to environmental stressors, increasing risk of mental health difficulties.

A systematic review of the mental health risks and resilience among pollution-exposed adolescents.

Pollution is harmful to human physical health and wellbeing. What is less well established is the relationship between adolescent mental health - a growing public health concern - and pollution. In response, we systematically reviewed studies documenting associations between pollution and mental health in adolescents. We searched Africa Wide, Medline, PsycArticles, PsycInfo, PubMed, CINAHL, ERIC, SciELO, Scopus, and Web of Science Core Collection for studies published up to 10 April 2020 that investigated exposure to any pollutant and symptoms of anxiety; depression; disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorders; neurodevelopmental disorders; psychosis; or substance abuse in 10-24-year-olds (i.e., adolescents as per expanded and more inclusive definition of adolescence). This identified 2291 records and we assessed 128 papers for inclusion. We used a narrative synthesis to coalesce the studies' findings. This review is registered on PROSPERO, CRD42020176664. Seventeen studies from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America were included. Air and water pollution exposure was associated with elevated symptoms of depression, generalised anxiety, psychosis, and/or disruptive, impulse control and conduct disorder. Exposure to lead and solvents was associated with neurodevelopmental impairments. Most studies neglected factors that could have supported the mental health resilience of adolescents exposed to pollution. Notwithstanding the limited quality of most reviewed studies, results suggest that pollution exposure is a risk to adolescent mental health. High-quality research is urgently required, including the factors and processes that protect the mental health of pollution-exposed adolescents. Studies with adolescents living in low- and lower middle-income countries and the southern hemisphere must be prioritized.

Using genetic algorithms to uncover individual differences in how humans represent facial emotion.

Emotional facial expressions critically impact social interactions and cognition. However, emotion research to date has generally relied on the assumption that people represent categorical emotions in the same way, using standardized stimulus sets and overlooking important individual differences. To resolve this problem, we developed and tested a task using genetic algorithms to derive assumption-free, participant-generated emotional expressions. One hundred and five participants generated a subjective representation of happy, angry, fearful and sad faces. Population-level consistency was observed for happy faces, but fearful and sad faces showed a high degree of variability. High test-retest reliability was observed across all emotions. A separate group of 108 individuals accurately identified happy and angry faces from the first study, while fearful and sad faces were commonly misidentified. These findings are an important first step towards understanding individual differences in emotion representation, with the potential to reconceptualize the way we study atypical emotion processing in future research.