scholarly journals The nature of posttraumatic nightmares and school functioning in war-affected youth

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (11) ◽  
pp. e0242414
Author(s):  
Gerlinde C. Harb ◽  
Jon-Håkon Schultz

Children and adolescents who have experienced traumatic events demonstrate a variety of posttraumatic symptoms, including recurrent nightmares, as well as adverse reactions in the school setting. The current study examined nightmare symptoms, posttraumatic stress, sleep disturbance, and self- and teacher-reported school functioning of 64 youths in the Gaza Strip, ages 12 to 16, who have lived through three wars and experience ongoing conflict and political insecurity. Students were treatment-seeking for sleep-problems and reported, on average, five nightmares per week for an average of three years, with concomitant disrupted sleep, fear of going to sleep, and not feeling rested in the morning. Both teachers and students reported that participants exhibited impaired academic functioning and daytime sleepiness. The content of the students’ nightmares demonstrated frightening themes of being under attack and loss of self-efficacy/control; threat levels were high, and almost 60% included the threat of death. Approximately half of the nightmares included surreal elements in addition to more realistic scenes of violence. Participants in the study demonstrated substantial posttraumatic sleep problems with intensely distressing, frequent and chronic nightmares, andnightmare symptoms were associated with impairment in school functioning. Given the disruptive and distressing nature of these students’ nightmare disturbance, we suggest that increasing self-efficacy in relation to the experience of recurrent nightmares may be a good point of intervention with these recurrently traumatized youth. Thus, increasing the understanding of students’ nightmare symptoms may lead to ameliorating the suffering of youths in war zones and may have positive effects on their school functioning.

Author(s):  
Omar S. Asfour ◽  
Samar Abu Ghali

City centers worldwide are perceived as essential parts of the city, where city memories are preserved and its identity is expressed. They are planned to satisfy the functional requirements and pleasurable qualities of the city. Under the accelerating urbanization of the modern city, several challenges face these centers including demographic, economic, and environmental challenges. This requires a continuous and incremental urban development process based on clear strategy and action plans. Thus, this study focuses on urban development strategies of city centers, with a focus on Rafah city located in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian Territories. The geographic location of this city near the Palestinian-Egyptian borders makes it a promising commercial city at local and regional levels. Thus, the current situation of Rafah city center has been analyzed, and several development strategies have been proposed. This has been done through a field survey based on observation and a questionnaire directed to city center users. It has been found that there is a great potential of Rafah city center to be developed as a commercial center. In this regard, several strategies and required actions have been proposed in the fields of transportation, environmental quality, shopping activities, investment opportunities, and visual perception.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (7) ◽  
pp. 1173-1190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyung Jin Choi ◽  
Sangmin Lee ◽  
Se-Ri No ◽  
Eung Il Kim

We examined how compassion can alleviate employees' negative emotions, behaviors, and thoughts. On the basis of self-regulatory resources theory, we hypothesized that there would be relationships between the 2 mediating variables of self-esteem and self-efficacy, and the dependent variables of anxiety, burnout, workplace deviance, and intention to quit. We collected data on these variables from 284 nurses, who work in a stressful job that necessitates compassion from colleagues, to test our theoretical model. The results revealed that compassion alleviated negative emotions (anxiety and burnout), behavior (workplace deviance), and thoughts (intention to quit), with both self-esteem and self-efficacy having mediating effects. Thus, we demonstrated the specific path through which compassion can have positive effects on an organization's employees. We discuss the observed relationship between compassion and self-regulation, and theoretical contributions regarding differences between self-esteem and self-efficacy, as well as between anxiety and burnout.


Author(s):  
Maria Grazia Imperiale ◽  
Alison Phipps ◽  
Giovanna Fassetta

AbstractThis article contributes to conversations on hospitality in educational settings, with a focus on higher education and the online context. We integrate Derrida’s ethics of hospitality framework with a focus on practices of hospitality, including its affective and material, embodied dimension (Zembylas: Stud Philos Educ 39:37–50, 2019). This article offers empirical examples of practices of what we termed ‘virtual academic hospitality’: during a series of online collaborative and cross borders workshops with teachers of English based in the Gaza Strip (Palestine), we performed academic hospitality through virtual convivial rituals and the sharing of virtual gifts, which are illustrated here. We propose a revision of the concept of academic hospitality arguing that: firstly, academic hospitality is not limited to intellectual conversations; secondly, that the relationship between hospitality and mobility needs to be revised, since hospitality mediated by the technological medium can be performed, and technology may even stretch hospitality towards the unreachable ‘unconditional hospitality’ theorised by Derrida (Of hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invited Jacques Derrida to respond. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000); and thirdly, that indigenous epistemics, with their focus on the affective, may offer alternative understandings of conviviality within the academy. These points may contribute to the collective development of a new paradigmatic understanding of hospitality, one which integrates Western and indigenous traditions of hospitality, and which includes the online environment.


Author(s):  
Marco LONGOBARDO

Abstract This paper explores the legality of the land closure imposed upon the Gaza Strip by Israel. After having considered the area under occupation, the paper argues that the legality of the closure must be determined under international humanitarian law, international human rights law, the principle of self-determination of peoples, and the Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In the light of these rules, the arbitrary closure of the Gaza Strip should be considered illegal because it breaches the unity between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and because it violates the freedom of movement of the local population. Moreover, the closure breaches the relevant rules pertaining to the transit of goods in occupied territory. The paper concludes that most of the violations caused by the closure affect peremptory rules which produce obligations erga omnes, so that any state in the international community is entitled to react under the law of state responsibility.


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