Abstract
One of the crucial features defining basic emotions and their prototypical facial expressions is their value for survival. Childhood traumatic experiences affect the effective recognition of facial expressions of negative emotions, normally allowing the recruitment of adequate behavioral responses to environmental threats. Specifically, anger becomes an extraordinarily salient stimulus unbalancing victims’ recognition of negative emotions. Despite the plethora of studies on this topic, to date, it is not clear whether this phenomenon reflects an overall response tendency toward anger recognition or a selective proneness to the salience of specific facial expressive cues of anger after trauma exposure. To address this issue, a group of underage Sierra Leonean Ebola virus disease survivors (mean age 15.40 years, SE 0.35; years of schooling 8.8 years, SE 0.46; 14 males) and a control group (mean age 14.55, SE 0.30; years of schooling 8.07 years, SE 0.30, 15 males) performed a forced-choice chimeric facial expressions recognition task. The chimeric facial expressions were obtained pairing upper and lower half faces of two different negative emotions (selected from anger, fear and sadness for a total of six different combinations). Overall, results showed that upper facial expressive cues were more salient than lower facial expressive cues. This priority was lost among Ebola virus disease survivors for the chimeric facial expressions of anger. In this case, differently from controls, Ebola virus disease survivors recognized anger regardless of the upper or lower position of the facial expressive cues of this emotion. The present results demonstrate that victims’ performance in the recognition of the facial expression of anger does not reflect an overall response tendency toward anger recognition, but rather the specific greater salience of facial expressive cues of anger. Furthermore, the present results show that traumatic experiences deeply modify the perceptual analysis of philogenetically old behavioral patterns like the facial expressions of emotions.
Highlights
Traumatic childhood experiences alter victims’ emotional development, with a negative impact on affect recognition, social interactions and self-regulation abilities
Exposure to early adverse experiences produces chronic and specific shifts in the explicit recognition of the facial expressions of negative emotions, generating a severe bias in the recognition of anger. Even if this phenomenon has been established among several samples exposed to disparate traumatic experiences and by means of different experimental procedures, to date it remains unclear if it can be associated to an overall response tendency toward anger recognition or to the greater perceptual salience attributed to the facial expressive cues of anger after trauma exposure
The recognition of social signals, such as facial expressions of emotions, is an important developmental ability that can be altered by the exposure to traumatic experiences during childhood
Summary
Traumatic childhood experiences alter victims’ emotional development, with a negative impact on affect recognition, social interactions and self-regulation abilities. West Africa countries mainly affected by Ebola outbreak were Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone where 28610 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases have been reported, with 11308 deaths since the onset of the Ebola outbreak (World Health Organization, 2016). The majority of these cases and deaths were reported between August and December 2014, date after which case incidence began to decline thanks to the scale-up of treatment, isolation, and safe burial practice in the three countries
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