Negotiating motherhood as a refugee: experiences of loss,love, survival and pain in the context of forced migration

The mental health of refugees has been an increasingly researched area, but has been criticised for having an individualised and symptom-focused approach to understanding the experience of forced migration. This paper attempts to respond to calls to address this culturally limited and incomplete way of conceptualising responses to experiences of persecution and terror bound up within global hegemony and power inequalities. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to analyse semi-structured interviews undertaken with six refugee mothers, with the aim of exploring how participants made sense of, and created meaning around parenting and family life in the UK. Three main themes emerged from the data analysis (a) loss as a constant companion to parenting; (b) a shifting view of the self as a mother; and (c) taking the good with the bad in family life. Methodological limitations, as well as implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Between Opportunity and Constraint: Understanding the Onward Migration of Highly Educated Iranian Refugees from Sweden

In the 1980s and early 1990s, more than 50,000 Iranian refugees moved to Sweden. The Swedish state attended to their immediate needs, providing housing, language training, and other types of support. Moreover, these migrants had almost immediate access to all the benefits of the Swedish welfare state including affordable healthcare, unemployment insurance, and free education up to and including the tertiary level. Despite the opportunities available to them in Sweden, many Iranian refugees have faced challenges, especially when trying to secure meaningful work. One of the strategies they have used to overcome barriers to entering the labor market is to leave Sweden for onward destinations which are seen as having relatively more to offer. This study explores the onward migration of Iranians from Sweden by way of a two-step mixed methods approach: in the first step, population register data is used to determine how onward migrants differ from those Iranians who stay in Sweden. In the second step, information from life history interviews conducted with onward migrants in London and Toronto is used to understand what motivates individuals to leave Sweden. Overall, the study finds that highly educated Iranians who have struggled to find employment in Sweden are the most likely to move on. Their precise motivations for doing so, however, are nuanced and complex and relate to more than just economic factors.     

Meta‐Analysis of Counseling Outcomes for the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

This meta‐analysis of 152 published posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) clinical trials from 1990 to 2012 concluded that counseling generally produced a small to large effect of treatment across all comparison conditions at termination (d+ = 0.30 to 0.89). These gains were maintained at longest follow‐up (d+ = 0.58 to 0.86) for the wait‐list, treatment‐as‐usual, and single‐group comparisons, but not for the follow‐up placebo comparison (d+ = 0.15), probably because of the low power (j = 3 placebo studies). Clinical trial findings were synthesized using a random‐effects model. No effects of publication bias or moderating variables were evident. No difference was found between trauma‐focused and non‐trauma‐focused approaches. Implications for counseling practice and future PTSD outcome research are addressed.     

Integration of spatial information across vision and language

Three experiments investigated whether spatial information acquired from vision and language is maintained in distinct spatial representations on the basis of the input modality. Participants studied a visual and a verbal layout of objects at different times from either the same (Experiments 1 and 2) or different learning perspectives (Experiment 3) and then carried out a series of pointing judgments involving objects from the same or different layouts. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that participants pointed equally fast on within- and between-layout trials; coupled with verbal reports from participants, this result suggests that they integrated all locations in a single spatial representation during encoding. However, when learning took place from different perspectives in Experiment 3, participants were faster to respond to within- than between-layout trials and indicated that they kept separate representations during learning. Results are compared to those from similar studies that involved layouts learned from perception only.     

Menstrual Reactivity: The Role of Gender-Specificity,Anxiety Sensitivity,and Somatic Concerns in Self-Reported Menstrual Distress

To determine the impact of gender roles, anxiety sensitivity, and somatic concerns on self-reported menstrual distress, two studies were conducted. In the first study using 278 primarily Caucasian college females, anxiety-sensitivity level, not current menstrual cycle phase, influenced reports of menstrual symptom severity and depression. Regardless of cycle phase at the time of self-report, women high in anxiety sensitivity reported significantly more depressed mood, trait anxiety, and retrospective menstrual symptoms. In the second study of 158 primarily Caucasian college females varying in anxiety sensitivity levels, adherence to sex role stereotypes, feminist beliefs, and illness attitudes were examined. Participants also completed measures of general premenstrual, most-recent premenstrual, and current menstrual symptoms. Women high in anxiety sensitivity reported the highest levels of sex-specificity, feminist embeddedness, and illness attitudes, with sex-specificity accounting for significant variance in current menstrual symptoms. Results are discussed within the context of the menstrual reactivity hypothesis, which proposes that beliefs surrounding the menstrual cycle and body sensations expectancies contribute to self-reports of greater menstrual distress. Women high in anxiety sensitivity appear to represent one subgroup vulnerable to menstrual reactivity.