Multiple research papers have been carried out on how children are affected on a psychological level. One of these works has been published very recently in the magazine Plos ONE (2015) and has to do with the way in which children who have been abused perceive and interpret the emotions that others express on their faces .
A group of Italian researchers in collaboration with the Ravera Children Rehabilitaton Center of Freetown in Sierra Leone, has carried out an experiment in which a group of street children and a group of control children, matched in age, have participated.
The task to be carried out by all was to decide what emotion was expressed by a series of people’s faces presented in some images. A measure of ‘recognition bias’ was taken as the tendency to overattribute the emotion of anger to faces that actually expressed other negative emotions such as disgust or fear. The researchers also took measurements of the participants’ heart rate as a stress-related physiological response.
The results showed that the group of street children who had been abused showed a tendency to label the emotions of the faces as ‘anger’ , and that this bias was related to the heart rate of the individuals. Interestingly, the same tendency to interpret emotions as ‘anger’ was also observed in the control group of boys, although much less intensely .
The study authors raise the possibility that being abused may act as an amplifier of a natural tendency to label emotional faces as ‘angry’ in forced-choice tasks. Furthermore, they would take it as evidence in favor of the theory that postulates that this bias would be an adaptive mechanism that makes the victims of abuse direct their attention to the social information of the environment.
It would be interesting to find out if and how these consequences can be changed or reversed. Perhaps further research will shed light on these issues so that victims of abuse can be helped.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
