Structural Stress and Learned Helplessness in Afghanistan: A Multi-Layer Analysis of the AFSTRESS Dari Corpus

TL;DR

This paper introduces AFSTRESS, a novel Dari corpus of stress narratives from Afghan individuals, enabling multi-level analysis of stress, emotions, and structural factors during a crisis.

Contribution

It presents the first multi-label Dari dataset on stress, including analysis of structural stressors, gender disparities, and baseline classification experiments.

Findings

Structural stressors like uncertain future dominate stress reports.

Baseline models achieve Micro-F1 around 0.66, outperforming some transformer models.

Threshold tuning significantly improves classification performance.

Abstract

We introduce AFSTRESS, the first multi-label corpus of self-reported stress narratives in Dari (Eastern Persian), comprising 737 responses collected from Afghan individuals during an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Participants describe experienced stress and select emotion and stressor labels via Dari checklists. The dataset enables analysis at three levels: computational (multi-label classification), social (structural drivers and gender disparities), and psychological (learned helplessness, chronic stress, and emotional cascade patterns). It includes 12 binary labels (5 emotions, 7 stressors), with high label cardinality (5.54) and density (0.462), reflecting complex, multi-dimensional stress. Structural stressors dominate: uncertain future (62.6 percent) and education closure (60.0 percent) exceed emotional states, indicating stress is primarily structurally driven. The strongest co-occurrence is between hopelessness and uncertain future (J = 0.388). Baseline experiments show that character TF-IDF with Linear SVM achieves Micro-F1 = 0.663 and Macro-F1 = 0.651, outperforming ParsBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, while threshold tuning improves Micro-F1 by 10.3 points. AFSTRESS provides the first Dari resource for computational analysis of stress and well-being in a crisis-affected population.