You Pray for Him a Bit More”: Young Adults’ Positive Aspects of Caregiving (PAC) Towards Parental Cancer

Young adult caregivers are growing in number, yet there is a paucity of literature on their role in informal family caregiving. The Positive Aspects of Caregiving (PAC) framework has been developed within Dementia carers to indicate positive outcomes of the caring experience. The current study specifically explored the narratives of four young adult carers’ lived experience of caring towards their parents with cancer, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) through the lens of PAC. Main themes developed from this study were unfolding the child-parent dyad, character building and affirmation of value systems, time reframed, and sustaining caregiving continuity with subthemes surrounding responsibility, appreciation beyond the role reversal, acceptance and sources of comfort. This small-scaled study contributes towards a new understanding of the young adult population, their perception of caregiving and briefly informs the PAC beyond a dementia population.

A Psychodrama Intervention to Loneliness Due to COVID-19

Loneliness as a psychological state is affective and cognitive discomfort or uneasiness from being or perceiving oneself to be alone or otherwise solitary. Since the beginning of the pandemic, people stayed at home, afraid of contracting COVID-19. As youths followed lectures via the internet for long hours without physical participation, they became more and more withdrawn and socially isolated. This study explores psychodrama as an intervention to reduce loneliness in university students. COVID-19 pandemic durations seemed to be caused loneliness for all people. The short-version of the ULCA loneliness scale was applied to 358 university students. 24 students were selected for the study based on their higher scores on the assessment. These students also accepted that COVID-19 negatively affected their loneliness state. The average age of participants was 21 years old, and no one was younger than 19 years old. Randomly they were divided into two groups as experimental and controlling with equal representation of number. The experimental group joined 15 weeks of psychodrama groups for 90 minutes each week. All sessions were held with via internet video platform meeting program. In psychodrama method of psychotherapy, clients enacted their concerns to achieve new insight about themselves and others. The psychodrama program started with introducing group participants and expression of why they are in the group to each other. The group was guided with an experienced group leader. With the techniques of psychodrama such as warmup, mirror, doubling, and role reversal, participants self-disclosed their current moods. K-square statistical analyses suggested that the group of university students who joined psychodrama overcame their loneliness. Education policy makers should bear in mind that today’s Covid-19 society suffers from psychological treatment deficits in the area of loneliness. Group action methods should be taken immediately. Group guidance, counseling, and drama in education and psychodrama can be useful for students to cope with problems resulting from of COVID-19. Youths truly need to share their suffering with professionals. Preventive guidance activities should be given importance in schools.

The comprehension of relative clauses in Mandarin Children with suspected specific language impairment

This paper investigates the comprehension of Relative Clauses (RCs) in 15 Mandarin children with suspected Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (aged between 4; 5 and 6; 0) and 29 typically developing (TD) controls. Results from a Character Picture Matching Task indicate that (i) the subject RC was better understood than the object RC in children with SLI, but there was no asymmetry in the comprehension of the two RCs in TD children; (ii) the performance of children with SLI was significantly worse than that of their TD peers; (iii) children with SLI were prone to committing thematic role reversal errors and middle errors. In order to overcome the shortcomings of previous accounts, we therefore put forward the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis, which can not only explain the asymmetry of comprehension seen in children with SLI but also shed light on the nature of errors committed by them in the task.

Role-reversals in Caregiving: Case Studies of Two Women Living With Late Stage Cancer

Many studies have examined the effects of caregiving burden and many others have focused on the effects of having a caregiver (Haynes-Lewis et al., 2018; Trevino, Prigerson, & Maciejewski, 2018; Semere et al., 2020). However, there is little data on the experience of role reversal, once responsible for caring for others and now being cared for while living with cancer. This project aims to identify ways in which women living with cancer cope with the internal struggles of receiving care. The current project is a case study of two females, one age 67, NHW, with a breast cancer diagnosis and one age 60, Black, with an ovarian cancer diagnosis, who once were caregivers and are now being cared for by family. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted that were approximately 60 minutes each. The study data are from a larger project focused on the self-perception of older women with late-stage cancer. Four independent researchers used thematic analysis to uncover common themes of coping between the two women receiving care. The themes uncovered were acceptance of the loss of autonomy, positive death attitudes, good relationships with their caregivers, and religiosity were identified and coded as coping strategies. The qualitative data showed that the use of these coping strategies helped the women be more accepting to care with less internal conflict. Future research should focus on generalizing these findings on a larger sample and use the data to help cancer patients better accept care from others.

Illuminated English Law Books

Illuminated books of the English legal tradition follow distinct iconographic patterns depending on the nature of the legal material included. The article explores correlations and dissonance between image and text as well as the symbolism associated with the imagery (in both initials and the margins) and its connection to political, legal and social discourses. It evaluates what the images reveal about key concepts of medieval law and justice, including kingship and good governance, the role of parliament and the church in endorsing these, as well as how these aspects might be undermined (or paradoxically confirmed) by medieval society’s penchant for role reversal, transgression and misrule.

Sex Role Reversal and High Frequency of Social Polyandry in the Pheasant-Tailed Jacana (Hydrophasianus chirurgus)

In a few species, males invest more than females in parental care while the females invest in mating competition and producing multiple broods for several mates. Species in the family Jacanidae are commonly used for studying this type of breeding system (called sex-role reversal), and previous studies found discrepancies and variation between species in the expected characteristics of reversed sex roles. Yet, a better understanding of sex role differences in breeding behavior in such species is crucial for disentangling possible evolutionary mechanisms leading to this peculiar breeding system. Sex-role reversal in the pheasant-tailed jacana Hydrophasianus chirurgus has been documented long time ago. Since the very early observation of this species, however, there was no attempt to provide a comprehensive and quantitative description of their breeding. This study aims to fill these knowledge gaps by investigating the sex role differences in the breeding behavior of pheasant-tailed jacanas, by observing and monitoring a breeding population in Taiwan. We focused on three main characteristics of sex-role reversal: (1) competition between females for access to males, such as agonistic and courtship behaviors, (2) polyandrous mating, and (3) male-only care. As expected, we found that females provide most of the territory defense toward conspecifics. Males also participated in agonistic behaviors, although less frequently than females. Furthermore, contrary to what was expected, we found that males spent more time than females on courtship behavior. Polyandrous females performed mating and laying sequentially with different mates but maintained the pair bonds simultaneously with multiple males. For the first time for the species, we could estimate that the average number of mates per female (i.e., degree of polyandry) was 2.4 and that at least 81.8% of the females in the population were polyandrous. Finally, our observations corroborated that brood care is predominantly provided by males, nevertheless females were also participating to some degree in brood attendance but never in direct care (i.e., brooding). This study highlights that some aspects of polyandrous breeding might deviate from stereotyped view on sex-role reversal, and stress the importance of further within species and comparative studies in order to fully understand the mechanisms leading to sex-role reversal.

A holographic superfluid symphony

We study the hydrodynamic excitations of backreacted holographic superfluids by computing the full set of quasinormal modes (QNMs) at finite momentum and matching them to the existing hydrodynamic theory of superfluids. Additionally, we analyze the behavior of the low-energy excitations in real frequency and complex momentum, going beyond the standard QNM picture. Finally, we carry out a novel type of study of the model by computing the support of the hydrodynamic modes across the phase diagram. We achieve this by determining the support of the corresponding QNMs on the different operators in the dual theory, both in complex frequency and complex momentum space. From the support, we are able to reconstruct the hydrodynamic dispersion relations using the hydrodynamic constitutive relations. Our analysis rules out a role-reversal phenomenon between first and second sound in this model, contrary to results obtained in a weakly coupled field theory framework.

Strong light-matter coupling for optical switching through the fluorescence and FRET control

Resonant interaction between excitonic transitions of molecules and localized electromagnetic field forms the hybrid polaritonic states. Tuneable microresonators may change the light-matter coupling strength and modulate them from weak to strong and ultra-strong coupling regimes. In this work we have realised strong coupling between the tuneable open-access cavity mode and the excitonic transitions in oligonucleotide-based molecular beacons with their terminus labelled with a pair of organic dye molecules demonstrating an efficient donor-to-acceptor Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET). We show that the predominant strong coupling of the cavity photon to the exciton transition in the donor dye molecule can lead to such a large an energy shift that the energy transfer from the acceptor exciton reservoir to the mainly donor lower polaritonic state can be achieved, thus yielding the chromophores’ donor–acceptor role reversal or “carnival effect”. The data show the possibility for confined electromagnetic fields to control and mediate polariton-assisted remote energy transfer. Obtained results open the avenues to quantum optical switching and other applications.