Minds Under Siege: Cognitive Signatures of Poverty and Trauma in Refugee and Non‐Refugee Adolescents

Chen, Alexandra; Panter‐Brick, Catherine; Hadfield, Kristin; Dajani, Rana; Hamoudi, Amar; Sheridan, Margaret A.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13320

Cited by 49 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…A recent study on Yazidi children indicated that preschoolers, living in a critically adverse context, show lower scores in hot and cool EFs tasks, in particular in delay of gratification and inhibition abilities, with a specific effect on motor (circle drawing task) and prevalent response (day and night Stroop task) control (Pellizzoni et al, 2019), thus confirming previous developmental research (Merz et al, 2016). On the other hand, a study conducted by Chen et al (2019) underlines a specific effect of poverty, but not violence, on WM. These findings highlight the importance of carefully distinguishing between types of childhood adversity exposure (e.g., violence and poverty) in order to identify the specific relevant neurocognitive pathways underlying children's cognitive functioning as well as their psychosocial well-being.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 70%

“…Furthermore, at a psychological level, differences in domain general cognitive abilities (e.g., intelligence), number words system used, and specific educational stimulations could have driven the data. Lastly, the level of poverty experienced in the specific geopolitical context may have had an impact on the differences we observed in preschool children involved in our study (see Chen et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

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Exploring EFs and Math Abilities in Highly Deprived Contexts

et al. 2020

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Executive functions (EFs)' development is critically affected by childhood adversity exposure. Although recent studies underlined the deleterious effects of early life stresses on working memory (WM) and inhibitory control, they were scarcely investigated in war context especially in relation with learning abilities. In order to fill this gap, we designed a research with the aim to evaluate EFs together with early math skills. In particular, we conducted a study involving 150 children divided into three groups: 48 Yazidis (M age = 71 months, SD = 6.59), 47 Syrian refugees (M age = 68.77 months, SD = 7, age), and 55 Italians (M age = 68.65 months, SD = 2.88) attending the third year of kindergarten in Italy or inserted in Psyco-Social-Support activities in Iraq. The children were evaluated with a variety of tasks assessing WM, inhibitory control, counting, digitquantity mapping, and digit naming skills. The results indicated substantial differences both in EFs and early numerical abilities between the deprived groups and the Italian children. Data are discussed in terms of implications for children both exposed to mainstream school environments and living in socioeconomically disadvantaged and deprived contexts.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Exploring EFs and Math Abilities in Highly Deprived Contexts

et al. 2020

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“…One project focused on innovative methodologies to measure program impacts beyond self-reported data [ 30 ]. Panter-Brick and colleagues evaluated a brief psychosocial intervention delivered to Syrian refugee and Jordanian non-refugee adolescents, combining mental health self-reports [ 31 ], stress biomarkers [ 32 , 33 ], and tablet-based cognitive testing [ 34 ].…”

Section: R2hc-funded Mhpss Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hair cortisol concentrations dropped by one-third, demonstrating a beneficial regulation of physiological stress [ 32 , 33 ]. However, no treatment effects were found for measures of cognitive function [ 34 ], or resilience [ 36 ], demonstrating that brief interventions can make notable impacts on psychosocial and biological stress, without necessarily changing broader social and developmental outcomes. These scientific findings informed programmatic decisions: Mercy Corps integrated elements of stress-attunement into its regional livelihood interventions and resilience-building efforts [ 30 ].…”

Section: Initial Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving mental health and psychosocial wellbeing in humanitarian settings: reflections on research funded through R2HC

et al. 2020

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Major knowledge gaps remain concerning the most effective ways to address mental health and psychosocial needs of populations affected by humanitarian crises. The Research for Health in Humanitarian Crisis (R2HC) program aims to strengthen humanitarian health practice and policy through research. As a significant portion of R2HC’s research has focused on mental health and psychosocial support interventions, the program has been interested in strengthening a community of practice in this field. Following a meeting between grantees, we set out to provide an overview of the R2HC portfolio, and draw lessons learned. In this paper, we discuss the mental health and psychosocial support-focused research projects funded by R2HC; review the implications of initial findings from this research portfolio; and highlight four remaining knowledge gaps in this field. Between 2014 and 2019, R2HC funded 18 academic-practitioner partnerships focused on mental health and psychosocial support, comprising 38% of the overall portfolio (18 of 48 projects) at a value of approximately 7.2 million GBP. All projects have focused on evaluating the impact of interventions. In line with consensus-based recommendations to consider a wide range of mental health and psychosocial needs in humanitarian settings, research projects have evaluated diverse interventions. Findings so far have both challenged and confirmed widely-held assumptions about the effectiveness of mental health and psychosocial interventions in humanitarian settings. They point to the importance of building effective, sustained, and diverse partnerships between scholars, humanitarian practitioners, and funders, to ensure long-term program improvements and appropriate evidence-informed decision making. Further research needs to fill knowledge gaps regarding how to: scale-up interventions that have been found to be effective (e.g., questions related to integration across sectors, adaptation of interventions across different contexts, and optimal care systems); address neglected mental health conditions and populations (e.g., elderly, people with disabilities, sexual minorities, people with severe, pre-existing mental disorders); build on available local resources and supports (e.g., how to build on traditional, religious healing and community-wide social support practices); and ensure equity, quality, fidelity, and sustainability for interventions in real-world contexts (e.g., answering questions about how interventions from controlled studies can be transferred to more representative humanitarian contexts).

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“…Children outside high-income communities have widely varying experiences with different types of computer interfaces (keypads, keyboards, touchscreens). Chen et al (2019) found that local and refugee children in Jordan learned to complete tablet-based tasks with only a few minutes of introduction, relying on their familiarity with cell phones (over 80% reported having one at home) rather than personal computers. Tablet-based task administration may help bridge the gap between children with and without experience using a personal computer, with the added benefit of improving mobility for geographically remote sites.…”

Section: Generalizability Of Statistical Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

Zinszer¹,

Hannon²,

Kouadio³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Children around the world learn to read across radically different educational systems and communities. In the west African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, children enter the fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying literacy skills in French, the official language for primary education. Previous studies have often linked performance in statistical learning tasks with differences in children’s and adults’ literacy outcomes, mainly in Western and high-income educational contexts. We asked whether Ivorian children’s individual differences in emergent second language literacy skills and analogous first language skills could also be explained by their performance in non-linguistic visual statistical learning (VSL). Across three iteratively-developed tasks, 157 children in rural communities surrounding the Adzópe region in Côte d’Ivoire completed a VSL task on touchscreen tablets. We found strong group-level evidence that children exploited the statistical regularities in the image sequence to decrease their response times, but in a post-test, their discrimination between valid and invalid sequences did not exceed chance. Overall, their responses were slower than U.S. children completing a similar task (Qi et al., 2019), and these individual differences in processing speed both confounded statistical learning and predicted second language emergent literacy skills. Moreover, the weak correlation to analogous skills in their first language further suggests that this task did not measure the same skills for the Ivorian children as in previous samples. We recommend adaptations to the statistical learning paradigm that may improve its generalizability across the wider global population.

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Minds Under Siege: Cognitive Signatures of Poverty and Trauma in Refugee and Non‐Refugee Adolescents

Cited by 49 publications

References 35 publications

Exploring EFs and Math Abilities in Highly Deprived Contexts

Exploring EFs and Math Abilities in Highly Deprived Contexts

Improving mental health and psychosocial wellbeing in humanitarian settings: reflections on research funded through R2HC

Statistical learning in children's emergent L2 literacy: Cross-cultural insights from rural Côte d'Ivoire

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