Impaired recognition of facial expressions of emotions in refugees: The role of war-related trauma

Exposure to traumatic events is associated with biases in the perception of emotional facial expressions. By bridging research on trauma exposure and emotion recognition, the present study investigated the impact of war-related trauma on the recognition of facial expressions of emotions in a sample of war trauma–exposed refugees (N = 108) from West Asian countries. Through a forced-choice facial emotion recognition experiment, we assessed how trauma exposure and face gender influenced accuracy and biases in identifying six primary emotions. Participants judged facial expressions of anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, and happiness displayed by a set of 240 faces corresponding to 20 female and 20 male models from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces dataset. Expressions consisted of short videos showing each face's transition from neutral to full emotion. The results showed impaired recognition of negative emotions, with fear being the least accurately recognized emotion, suggesting the avoidance of negative affective states as a coping mechanism putatively associated with war-related trauma. For main effects, partial eta-squared effect sizes ranged from.159 to.573, and effect sizes for interaction effects ranged from.027 to.189, with most effects being in the medium-to-large range. Furthermore, the biases in emotion recognition observed in the present study may reflect gender stereotypes and social norms that shape how individuals perceive and interpret emotional expression in men and women.