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War-related trauma linked to increased sustained attention to threat in children.

ABSTRACT: Experiences of war and displacement can have profound effects on children's affective development and mental health, although the mechanism(s) underlying these effects remain unknown. This study investigated the link between early adversity and attention to affective stimuli using a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm with Syrian refugee (n = 31, M_age = 9.55, 12 female) and Jordanian non-refugee (n = 55, M_age = 9.98, 30 female) children living in Jordan (March 2020). Questionnaires assessed PTSD, anxiety/depression, insecurity, distress, and trauma. Refugee children showed greater initial avoidance of angry and happy faces compared to non-refugee children, and higher trauma exposure was linked to increased sustained attention to angry stimuli. These findings suggest that war-related trauma may have differential effects on the early and later stages of affective processing in refugee children.

SUBMITTER: Michalek J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9542223 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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War-related trauma linked to increased sustained attention to threat in children.

Michalek Julia J Lisi Matteo M Binetti Nicola N Ozkaya Sumeyye S Hadfield Kristin K Dajani Rana R Mareschal Isabelle I

Child development 20220211 4

Experiences of war and displacement can have profound effects on children's affective development and mental health, although the mechanism(s) underlying these effects remain unknown. This study investigated the link between early adversity and attention to affective stimuli using a free-viewing eye-tracking paradigm with Syrian refugee (n = 31, M<sub>age</sub> = 9.55, 12 female) and Jordanian non-refugee (n = 55, M<sub>age</sub> = 9.98, 30 female) children living in Jordan (March 2020). Quest ...[more]

PMID: 35147214

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Project description:ObjectiveIt is increasingly recognized that trauma victims, particularly Veterans, have co-occurring psychological and physical conditions that impact cognition, especially the domains of sustained attention and executive functioning. Although previous work has generally attempted to isolate the unique cognitive effects of common combat-related comorbidities, less work has been done to examine how these conditions co-occur, and whether unique cognitive signatures accompany certain clinical combinations.MethodTo address this gap, we examined how several deployment-related conditions were associated with performance on a well-validated measure of sustained attention (i.e., gradual onset continuous performance task [gradCPT]) and a battery of standard neuropsychological measures in 123 Veterans from the Translational Research Center for TBI and Stress Disorders. Initially, a Principal component analysis was conducted to investigate how comorbid conditions grouped together.ResultsSeveral sustained attention measures from the gradCPT were differentially associated with four unique combinations of trauma-related pathology. Specifically, a somatic component representing the combination of current pain, sleep disturbance, and mild traumatic brain injury was associated with a higher rate of failures of attentional engagement. On the other hand, a comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and mood disorder component (moodPTSD), as well as a substance use disorder component, were associated with higher rates of inhibitory control failures. Increased attentional instability was associated with moodPTSD as well as an anxiety disorder component. In contrast, the cognitive effects of deployment-related trauma were not observed on standard neuropsychological measures.ConclusionThese findings suggest that unique combinations of trauma-related pathology have dissociable effects on sustained attentional control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Dataset Information

War-related trauma linked to increased sustained attention to threat in children.

Publications

War-related trauma linked to increased sustained attention to threat in children.

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