Abstract
Studies of children with atypical emotional experience demonstrate that childhood exposure to high levels of hostility and threat biases emotion perception. This study investigates emotion processing, in former child soldiers and non-combatant civilians. All participants have experienced prolonged violence exposure during childhood. The study, carried out in Sierra Leone, aimed to examine the effects of exposure to and forced participation in acts of extreme violence on the emotion processing of young adults war survivors. A total of 76 young, male adults (38 former child soldier survivors and 38 civilian survivors) were tested in order to assess participants' ability to identify four different facial emotion expressions from photographs and movies. Both groups were able to recognize facial expressions of emotion. However, despite their general ability to correctly identify facial emotions, participants showed a significant response bias in their recognition of sadness. Both former soldiers and civilians made more errors in identifying expressions of sadness than in the other three emotions and when mislabeling sadness participants most often described it as anger. Conversely, when making erroneous identifications of other emotions, participants were most likely to label the expressed emotion as sadness. In addition, while for three of the four emotions participants were better able to make a correct identification the greater the intensity of the expression, this pattern was not observed for sadness. During movies presentation the recognition of sadness was significantly worse for soldiers. While both former child soldiers and civilians were found to be able to identify facial emotions, a significant response bias in their attribution of negative emotions was observed. Such bias was particularly pronounced in former child soldiers. These findings point to a pervasive long-lasting effect of childhood exposure to violence on emotion processing in later life.
Highlights
Emotion recognition requires the observer to relate the observed facial feature configurations to emotional states
In the present study we examined the effects of passive and passive and active exposure, during childhood, to extreme trauma and mass violence on facial emotion recognition
The present study aims to investigate whether the exposure to mass violence during childhood affects the emotion recognition in early adult life
Summary
Emotion recognition requires the observer to relate the observed facial feature configurations to emotional states. In ordinary social interactions the observer most likely does not wait until others’ facial expression is at its peak to identify their emotional state. Pollak and Sinha (2002) propose that rapid and accurate recognition of such early emotion signals facilitates social functioning and is guided by the observer’s own experiences and emotion understanding. Studies of children with atypical emotional experience (e.g., those who have experienced maltreatment and abuse) demonstrate that early childhood exposure to high levels of hostility and threat biases emotion recognition such that children identify facial expressions of anger on the basis of less sensory input than controls (Pollak and Sinha, 2002; Pollak et al, 2009). Further evidence of an experiential bias in emotion recognition comes from data showing that abused children respond to faces expressing anger with relative increases in brain activity with respect to controls and that they demonstrate rapid orienting to and delayed disengagement from anger expressions regardless of modality of presentation (Shackman and Pollak, 2005; Pollak, 2008)
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