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The human mind is prone to numerous errors in decision-making, attention and interpretation of events, feelings and understanding people’s intentions. Psychologists refer to these errors as cognitive biases, which can have both positive and negative impacts on well-being. For example, remembering doing better on an exam than one actually did can help one’s self-esteem. By contrast, interpreting someone’s friendly actions as negative may lead to social anxiety and avoidance of a potential positive interaction.
There are many reasons why these cognitive biases might arise, and many of them are linked to poor mental health. What I am interested in exploring in my project is whether these cognitive biases might be linked to perceived ethnic discrimination and post-migration living difficulties in migrants. There is plenty of evidence suggesting an increased risk of mental health problems in migrant populations. Much of this risk comes from pre- and post-migration traumatic experiences, including discrimination. But does this mean that perceiving negativity from people can lead to changes in one’s cognition, changes in how one sees the world? My research project was designed to answer this question.
To do so, we have designed computer tasks focusing on three cognitive biases. The first task measured emotion recognition bias, or whether people tend to interpret neutral or ambiguous emotional facial expressions as happy or angry. The second task measured attentional biases, or whether people would be faster to find a letter on a screen if they are cued with a fearful, angry or happy face looking in the same or opposite direction from the letter. Finally, my favourite task explored whether people interpret others’ positive, negative, neutral and ambiguous actions as friendly or aggressive. In this task, participants were presented not with people, but with moving light dots that represented human figures (called Point Light Walkers) – our mind is so fascinating that it searches for patterns in everything. We have also investigated whether these cognitive biases related to measures of mental health, post-migration living difficulties and, of course, perceived ethnic discrimination.
Despite cognitive biases being tightly linked with mental health, and, in turn, mental health being negatively impacted by discrimination, we are finding odd relationships between cognitive biases and discrimination. On the one hand, participants do not see ambiguous Point Light Walkers as more friendly or aggressive, but those who experience more discrimination perceive scrambled ones (just randomly moving dots that do not represent any specific actions or human figures) as more aggressive. In other words, they have a negative cognitive bias, which is what we anticipated. On the other hand, it seems that migrants who perceive more discrimination tend to interpret neutral faces as happier than those who do not experience discrimination or show a positive cognitive bias.
It is not currently clear why these biases do not align in the same direction, and we can only speculate on what this could mean, as correlation does not imply causation. We believe some of these biases might be acting as protective mechanisms for migrants, seeing things or faces as if they were more positive than they are. Research on migrants or even ethnic minority participants and cognitive biases is still very new, so a lot more investigation into this will be needed to fully understand the extent of the impact of migration experience on one’s cognition. Stay tuned for more answers in the future!