The Impact of War: Posttraumatic Stress and Social Trust Among Refugees

The successful integration of refugees is one of the defining challenges for asylum countries such as Sweden in the 21st century. Two important aspects of successful integration are to ensure the psychological health and social functioning of refugees burdened with a recent traumatic past. Rigorous empircial research on these topics is needed in order to provide a sound basis for policy. In this report, we examine the psychological and social consequences of the experience of wartime trauma in refugee populations. There were two main purposes of the report. The first purpose was to explore how residency in different host societies shapes the development of posttraumatic stress among traumatized refugees. The second purpose was to examine how wartime trauma affects the tendency to trust and be altruistic towards others, including both members of one’s own group and ethnoreligious outgroups. We report a study in which refugees from Syria and Iraq residing in Sweden and Turkey engaged in economic games that provide behavioral measures of social trust and willingness to consider the welfare of others when distributing economic resources. We also assessed degree of exposure to wartime trauma and posttrau- matic stress symptoms among the refugee participants and related these measures to their behavior in the economic games. The main findings from the report can be summarized in two main points. First, refugees from the wars in Syria and Iraq residing in Sweden show a greater propen- sity to develop posttraumatic stress in response to traumatic wartime experiences compared to refugees living in Turkey. Second, while exposure to trauma resulted in more sectarianism – i.e. ingroup bias along ethnoreligious lines – in the Turkish sample, trauma did not affect sectarianism in the Swedish sample. With this report we seek to contribute to evidence-based policy and efforts to mit- igate negative consequences resulting from war trauma among refugees. More interventions may be needed to treat posttraumatic stress among refugees in Sweden. The refugees’ own ethnic and religious community may possibly have a key role to play in these efforts, since a sense of cultural, social and religious prox- imity and belongingness appeared to play a role in ameliorating the development of posttraumatic symptoms.