Reflections on Trauma: A Phenomenological Qualitative Secondary Analysis of Archived Interviews about Adolescent Experiences During the 1970 Kent State Student Shootings

Among short-term mental health consequences for adolescents who have proximate or direct experience with mass shootings in school settings are posttraumatic stress and posttraumatic stress disorder. Identifying incidence of enduring mental health impacts is challenging due to difficulty of tracking individuals into adulthood. The purpose of this paper is to use qualitative secondary analysis to explore how seven individuals reflectively describe and interpret their lived experiences as adolescents during the May 4, 1970, Kent State University Vietnam protest that resulted in deaths and injuries to students fired upon by Ohio National Guard. Archived transcripts from interviews conducted up to 48 years after the event were analyzed using a phenomenological qualitative approach. Aspects of common experience included confusion, emotionally charged responses from others directed toward community members following the event, and belief the experience had a profound and lasting impact on their lives, exemplified by vivid memories of minute details and comparative responses to other events. These findings illustrate how others’ reactions and subsequent incidents contribute to retraumatization into adult years. This report demonstrates the value of qualitative secondary analysis in general, while specific findings illustrate long-term impact of an adolescent trauma experience.

Women in Mauritius

The Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius has a population made up of the descendants of migrants from France, India, Africa, and China. Mauritius has a multicultural and multi-ethnic population and these divisions impact upon Mauritian women’s rights and political mobilization in the country. Women were expected to support the men of their community and, in the mid 1940s, female suffrage was proposed by men from the elite and wealthy groups to win votes for their communities. There is no evidence of a women’s lobby for the franchise. Despite the controversy surrounding female suffrage, Mauritius had two women members of parliament following the election after proclamation of female suffrage. Under 19th-century Mauritian law the state treated women as the inalienable property of their husbands. The “Code Napoleon” or “Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804,” adopted in 1808 in Mauritius, imposed the status of “minor” on a married woman and was characterized by severe patriarchalism, restricting women to the private domestic sphere. Despite these restrictions, women were not passive and they were drawn into the economic and political struggles of the early 20th century. One of the most vivid memories is that of Anjalay Coopen, a female agricultural laborer who was among the people killed during an uprising on the sugar estates in 1943. Mauritius became independent in 1968 and the role that women played in the negotiations leading to independence remains unclear to this day due to a paucity of research in this area, male domination of the political and historical writings of the country, and the fact that the Mauritian population was highly divided over independence. Women’s-movement activism peaked in the mid-1970s. This was when women’s organizations grouped together on common platforms to lobby for changes in the civil code and laws governing marriage and the Immigration and Deportation Act, which allowed for the deportation of foreign husbands of Mauritian women but not for foreign wives of Mauritian men. Women from different communities rallied together for equal rights for women, generating a strong national women’s movement.

My own experience of COVID-19

England has seen its worst days; past few months have been full of multiple challenges and hard struggle for the people of United Kingdom. No rules in the beginning of the current pandemic to few restrictions like social distancing and eventually implementation of a complete lockdown. To one’s surprise, the restrictions were not very strictly followed in the beginning. I have the vivid memories of the fear surrounding us all by the daily reports from Italy.

Spatial gist extraction during human memory consolidation

Theories of memory consolidation suggest that initially rich, vivid memories become more gist-like over time. However, it is unclear whether gist-like representations reflect a loss of detail through degradation or the blending of experiences into statistical averages, and whether the strength of these representations increases, decreases, or remains stable over time. We report three behavioral experiments that address these questions by examining distributional learning during spatial navigation. In Experiment 1, human participants navigated a virtual maze to find hidden objects with locations varying according to spatial distributions. After 15 minutes, 1 day, 7 days, or 28 days, we tested their navigation performance and explicit memory. In Experiment 2, we created spatial distributions with no object at their mean locations, thereby disentangling learned object exemplars from statistical averages. In Experiment 3, we created only a single, bimodal distribution to avoid possible confusion between distributions and administered tests after 15 minutes or 28 days. Across all experiments, and for both navigation and explicit tests, representations of the spatial distributions were present soon after exposure, but then receded over time. These findings help clarify the temporal dynamics of consolidation in human learning and memory.

TASTING GAZIANTEP: HOW LOCAL FOOD SHAPES SENSE OF PLACE

Local food is an integral part of the cultural heritage and tourist attraction of a destination. Local food may create peak experiences for a tourist. Taste and smell create lasting impressions and memories, shaping tourist experience and leading to an association between food and place. This paper aims to analyse the conditions of such an association. After a review of relevant literature, focus group interviews were conducted with participants who had visited Gaziantep. We have found out that while local food creates lasting impressions, unfamiliarity usually results in more memorable experiences, and participants who spent longer time in the city, with higher motivation and means to experience the local food expressed more vivid memories. Likely, complementary cultural heritage and accompanying visual elements create a more complete and memorable sensory experience as well as a stronger association. Lastly, time passed after the trip turned out to be insignificant on memorability.

The Peak-End Rule

Even now, I have vivid memories of my last day of high school. Do you? In my mind's eye, I'm cleaning out my locker, then staring at the emptiness for a few extra beats before slamming it shut for the last time. I'm roaming the halls with my best friend, blissfully ignoring the bells going off every 50 minutes on schedule because, just today, we're allowed to break the rules. I'm sitting on my desk, swinging my feet, and shooting the breeze with my English teacher Mr. Carr in a way that makes me feel almost grown up. It's maybe my favorite day of the whole year. And like the final layer of watercolor, the freedom and lightness I feel seeps into the rest of my memories of that day and turns them just a shade rosier. If the school year hasn't yet ended for your kids, consider what you can do to make the finale count. Why?

Gernikaren itzalpean: Propaganda, Appropriation, and Depoliticisation of Basque Art Music

The Bombing of Guernica stands as the best-known war crime during the Spanish Civil War. The town symbolically representing the Basque essences was destroyed by a German-Italian air raid lasting over three hours, and almost two hundred people were killed. Unfortunately, this abominable event remains contentious among disparate political factions, sometimes upholding its memory by means of tailor-made interpretations.As music often performs a political role within conflicts, particularly those involving violence, it is not surprising that the Bombing of Guernica has inspired several compositions of art music. Among them, we study three works by Basque composers, namely Pablo Sorozábal, Francisco Escudero, and Ramon Lazkano. Each case study respectively stands, politically speaking, as a propagandistic event, a musical appropriation, and a collateral depoliticization of the vivid memories around the war crime.