Negotiating daughterhood and strangerhood: retrospective accounts of serial migration

Most considerations of daughtering and mothering take for granted that the subjectivities of mothers and daughters are negotiated in contexts of physical proximity throughout daughters’ childhoods. Yet many mothers and daughters spend periods separated from each other, sometimes across national borders. Globally, an increasing number of children experience life in transnational families. This paper examines the retrospective narratives of four women who were serial migrants as children (whose parents migrated before they did) . It focuses on their accounts of the reunion with their mothers and how these fit with the ways in which they construct their mother-daughter relationships. We take a psychosocial approach by using a psychoanalytically-informed reading of these narratives to acknowledge the complexities of the attachments produced in the context of migration and to attend to the multi-layered psychodynamics of the resulting relationships. The paper argues that serial migration positioned many of the daughters in a conflictual emotional landscape from which they had to negotiate ‘strangerhood’ in the context of sadness at leaving people to whom they were attached in order to join their mothers (or parents). As a result, many were resistant to being positioned as daughters, doing daughtering and being mothered in their new homes

Cultural Aspects of Attachment Anxiety, Avoidance, and Life Satisfaction: Comparing the US and Turkey

Attachment insecurity can interfere with the experience, expression, and benefits of positive emotions, including happiness and life satisfaction (LS). However, both the pattern and effects of insecure attachment orientations on LS vary across cultures. Considering that attachment anxiety is higher in collectivist cultures and attachment avoidance is relatively high in individualistic cultures, the present chapter elaborates on the idea that anxious and avoidant attachment would have varying effects on LS in individualistic and collectivistic cultural contexts. Study 1 (N = 2456) involved a community sample of married couples in Turkey and demonstrated that attachment avoidance was a stronger predictor of LS than attachment anxiety in Turkish collectivist context. Study 2 tested the hypothesis that the roles of attachment anxiety and avoidance in predicting LS would vary between collectivistic and individualistic cultures. Mothers’ adult attachment dimensions and LS in Turkey (N = 89) and the United States (N = 91) were measured. As expected, results indicated that LS was predicted only by attachment avoidance in Turkey and by attachment anxiety in the United States. These findings are in line with the cultural fit hypothesis, suggesting that culturally incongruent attachment orientations have a stronger negative impact on individuals’ LS

Psychophysiological processes of stress in chronic physical illness: a theoretical perspective

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75576/1/j.1365-2648.1990.tb01843.x.pd

Sexual exploitation in children: Nature, prevalence and distinguishing characteristics reported in young adulthood

The aim of this study was to explore the nature and extent of sexual exploitation in a university student sample, whilst being clear that sexual exploitation is sexual abuse. Overall, 47% of participants (96 out of 204) reported having been approached by an adult in a sexual manner when they were under the age of 16. The study predicted that a number of individual characteristics would increase a young person’s vulnerability for sexual exploitation. These included low self-esteem, external locus of control, social loneliness and insecure attachment. Results indicated lower levels of self-esteem among those who had been approached sexually, although it is not clear in terms of causality. There were no differences in scores for locus of control or loneliness. Relationship anxiety was significantly linked with children having engaged in sexual behaviours with an adult. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of emerging individual characteristics relating to a risk of sexual exploitation