Abstract
Early adversity and trauma can have profound effects on children’s affective development and mental health outcomes. Interventions that improve mental health and socioemotional development are essential to mitigate these effects. We conducted a pilot study examining whether a reading-based program (We Love Reading) improves emotion recognition and mental health through socialization in Syrian refugee (n = 49) and Jordanian non-refugee children (n = 45) aged 7–12 years old (M = 8.9, 57% girls) living in Jordan. To measure emotion recognition, children classified the expression in faces morphed between two emotions (happy–sad and fear–anger), while mental health was assessed using survey measures of optimism, depression, anxiety, distress, and insecurity. Prior to the intervention, both groups of children were significantly biased to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as sad, while there was no clear bias on the fear–anger spectrum. Following the intervention, we found changes in Syrian refugee children’s bias in emotion recognition away from sad facial expressions, although this returned to pre-intervention levels 2 months after the end of the program. This shift in the bias away from sad facial expressions was not associated with changes in self-reported mental health symptoms. These results suggest a potential positive role of the reading intervention on affective development, but further research is required to determine the longer-term impacts of the program.
Highlights
More than 1% of the world’s population is currently forcibly displaced: 26 million of the 79.5 million forcibly displaced people are refugees, and more than half of these are under the age of 18 (UNHCR, 2020)
Happy–sad task The bias or the point of subjective equality (PSE): We find no significant differences between the Syrian refugee and Jordanian non-refugee groups, nor between the subgroups of Syrian refugee experimental and Syrian refugee control, or between Jordanian non-refugee experimental and Jordanian non-refugee control at T1 (Table 3), with all participants displaying a significant bias toward perceiving neutral faces as sad (Figure 2B)
Fear–anger task There were no significant differences between the Syrian refugee and Jordanian non-refugee groups, nor between the experimental and control subgroups within Syrian refugees or within Jordanian non-refugees at T1 (Table 3), with children exhibiting no significant bias toward either emotion (Figure 2D)
Summary
More than 1% of the world’s population is currently forcibly displaced: 26 million of the 79.5 million forcibly displaced people are refugees, and more than half of these are under the age of 18 (UNHCR, 2020). In line with the tripartite model of the emotion socialization theory, despite a lack of discussion about the emotional content of the stories, teachers and peers can influence children’s socialization through modeling emotional expressions during the reading sessions (observing others’ emotional displays and interactions) This type of social referencing and modeling, as well as positive emotional contagion (transmission of certain emotions or behaviors between individuals), could impact children’s affective development (Morris et al, 2007), and subsequently result in improved emotion recognition abilities. Suggestive of the idea that the impact of socio-emotional interventions might be influenced by children’s prior life experiences is Finlon et al.’s (2015) evaluation of an emotionbased preventative intervention aimed at increasing emotional intelligence through both classroom- and home-based exercises They found that preschool children in the high-risk group – who had experienced more stress and less parental support – benefited more from the program compared to children in the low-risk group, indicating increased benefits for children with a history of early adversity. Following the WLR intervention, we hypothesized that children’s mental health, wellbeing, and emotion recognition would improve through emotion socialization, but that this would be more pronounced for the Syrian refugee children than the Jordanian non-refugee children
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