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

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.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Demographic distribution ($N=737$): Female 660 (90%), Male 77 (10%). 65% of respondents aged 18--25 (476 individuals). The 90% female rate reflects differential crisis impact, particularly the girls' education ban, not a sampling error.
• Figure 2: Label prevalence (% of 737 respondents, all 12 labels). Structural stressors, Uncertain future (62.6%) and Education closure (60.0%), exceed the prevalence of primary emotional states (Stress 58.1%).
• Figure 3: Label cardinality: responses by number of active labels. Mean = 5.54 (dashed line). 65% of responses carry $\geq$4 labels. High cardinality indicates compound, chronic stress rather than isolated conditions.
• Figure 4: Emotion--Stressor co-occurrence matrix: joint positive counts ($N=737$). Hopelessness--Uncertain future (329) and Stress--Uncertain future (300) are the strongest pairs. All cells are positive: every stressor co-occurs with every emotion.
• Figure 5: Pearson correlation heatmap (12$\times$12, merged labels). All off-diagonal correlations are positive. Strongest pair: Hopelessness--Uncertain future ($r=0.40$).