Exploring Community Mobilization in Northern Quebec: Motivators,Challenges, and Resilience in Action

Nunavimmiut (people of the land) are the Indigenous peoples of the northern peninsula of the province of Quebec. Communities of Nunavik and its regional organizations have been making concerted efforts in implementing community‐based strategies to support family wellbeing. These community strategies are grounded in many of the values underpinning community psychology: favoring empowerment‐oriented approaches, fostering community capacity, and transforming organizational cultures to allow for new modes of interaction, as well as new policies and practices that are grounded in community and culture. Despite the growing support and expectation for community mobilization, there is still very little research on the processes and challenges to such mobilization. In this study, we explored the unique challenges and facilitators to community endeavors in northern Quebec in order to better understand the complex dynamics and the strengths that Inuit build upon. We first used a focused ethnographic approach in the context of a 5‐year community mobilization project in Nunavik. We then conducted 12 individual interviews and two small group interviews with Inuit working on community‐based wellbeing‐oriented mobilization projects in four additional communities. Results expose how sociogeographical realities and colonialism influence the process of community mobilization. They also highlight the values and motivational factors that lead community members to move beyond these influences.     

Complex Trauma in Children and Youth: A Scoping Review of Sensory-Based Interventions

Emerging evidence in neuroscience indicates exposure to complex trauma in children and youth affects brain development—particularly with the ability to process sensory information. This sensory processing challenge has been shown to negatively impact emotional and self-regulation. A developing area of trauma treatment utilizes sensory-based interventions to target these concerns. A scoping review of the literature indicates there is limited, although promising, evidence for the use of these interventions when used as part of an integrated treatment approach. Occupational therapy is in a unique position to contribute to this area of practice due to a background in sensory-based approaches.     

HOLISTIC BIOLOGY: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT MATTERS

Recent developments toward a more holistic biology do not eliminate reductionism and determinism, but they do suggest more complex forms of them, in which there are multiple, interacting influences, as there are in complex or chaotic systems. Though there is a place in biology for both systemic and atomistic modes of explanation, for those with a theological perspective the shift to complex explanations in biology is often welcome. It suggests a more subtle view of divine action in which God's purposes are affected through engagement with the complex systems of creation rather than by discrete interventions. It also invites us to connect the biological interdependence with the interdependence in the nature and purposes of God, and it is consonant with a mystical vision of the unity of all things.     

Growth points in research on memory and hippocampus.

We present an overview of two of our on-going projects relating processes in the hippocampus to memory. We are trying to understand why retrograde amnesia occurs after damage to the hippocampus. Our experiments establish the generality of several new retrograde amnesia phenomena that are at odds with the consensus view of the role of the hippocampus in memory. We show in many memory tasks that complete damage to the hippocampus produces retrograde amnesia that is equivalent for recent and remote memories. Retrograde amnesia affects a much wider range of memory tasks than anterograde amnesia. Normal hippocampal processes can interfere with retention of a long-term memory stored outside the hippocampus. We conclude that the hippocampus competes with nonhippocampal systems during memory encoding and retrieval. Finally, we outline a project to understand and manipulate adult hippocampal neurogenesis in order to repair damaged hippocampal circuitry to recover lost cognitive functions.     

Psychology and African-American women: Findings from applied research

The current applied research on African-American women is characterized by a limited focus on primarily poor and single mothers and comparative studies with white women. The resulting research ignores the diversity within African-American women generalizing from noncomparative or restrictive samples to all African-American women and provides narrowly focused and/or inappropriate research models in which to study the development of these women across the life span. This review focuses on some of this research as it relates to social context factors in African-American women's lives: social supports and parenting, work and self-esteem, gender role attitudes and marital life, and mental health. An examination of methodological problems and suggestions for future research is discussed.     

The Social Goals of Excuses: Self‐Serving Attributions or Politeness Strategies1

Participants provided examples of explanations given as excuses, or withheld in favor of a false excuse, both for failing to keep a social contract and for rejecting a social invitation. Results show that the likelihood of an explanation being given in social‐contract situations was best predicted by intentionality and controllability; while in social‐rejection situations, the most important factor was to avoid personal reasons (related to the recipient). Excuse‐givers were even willing to blame themselves to do this. These results are discussed in terms of the need to extend attributional categories beyond traditional self‐serving functions to include social goals. such as the recipient saving face, to provide an adequate account of how excuse‐making varies across different types of social predicaments.