“Keeping It Together, Keeping Their Heads Above Water”: Western Australian Child Health Nurses’ Understanding Of Resilience In Postpartum Mothers

Assessing the well-being of postpartum mothers is an important aspect of postnatal nursing care. For this reason, Child Health Nurses (CHNs) are charged with the responsibility of identifying postpartum mothers who do/not manifest resilient behavioral qualities. However, little is known about CHNs’ conceptualization of resilience or how they assess resilience in postpartum mothers. This exemplar study addressed this knowledge shortfall by conducting semi-structured interviews with eight practicing CHNs. The study’s findings reveal that although CHNs’ conceptual understanding of resilience is congruent with current theoretical thinking, some variance does exist in the ways in which CHNs assess postpartum resilience, particularly, in relation to CHNs’ use of intuitive assessment techniques to appraise the critical maternal postpartum coping qualities of adaptation, responsiveness, self-confidence, and social connectedness

Posttraumatic stress and posttraumatic growth and their relationship to coping and self-efficacy in Northwest Australian Cyclone communities

The main focus of disaster research conducted to date has been on providing insights into the negative consequences of experiencing a serious threat or adversity. The present study extends this research endeavor by investigating the positive posttrauma resiliency experiences of 512 survey respondents living in four cyclone-prone communities in Northwest Australia. The findings reveal that disaster stress is often accompanied by disaster growth and, thus, provides an alternative resilience-based way of viewing postdisaster interventions

Lifting the domestic cloak of silence: Resilient Australian women\u27s reflected memories of their childhood experiences of witnessing domestic violence

Recognition is growing that childhood witnessing of domestic violence is tantamount to child abuse due to the damage the experience may have on the witnessing child’s long-term emotional and social wellbeing. This paper helps to lift the cloak of silence that surrounds the child witnessing phenomenon by presenting the recollected adult memories of six female former child witnesses. Utilizing a mixed case-study and consensual qualitative research design, the study’s findings reveal that the potential threat to a child witness’s immediate and long-term wellbeing can be mediated through the progressive development of a range of adaptive coping strategies. Of these, the strategy of establishing a safe place and a supportive relationship outside of the abusive nuclear family home seems pivotal to the witnessing child’s resilient ability to move on and lead a ‘rewarding’ adult life. The paper closes with a discussion on how the research findings can be progressed

The hard quiescent spectrum of the neutron-star X-ray transient EXO 1745-248 in the globular cluster Terzan 5

We present a Chandra observation of the globular cluster Terzan 5 during times when the neutron-star X-ray transient EXO 1745-248 located in this cluster was in its quiescent state. We detected the quiescent system with a (0.5-10 keV) luminosity of ~2 x 10^{33} ergs/s. This is similar to several other neutron-star transients observed in their quiescent states. However, the quiescent X-ray spectrum of EXO 1745--48 was dominated by a hard power-law component instead of the soft component that usually dominates the quiescent emission of other neutron-star X-ray transients. This soft component could not conclusively be detected in EXO 1745-248 and we conclude that it contributed at most 10% of the quiescent flux in the energy range 0.5-10 keV. EXO 1745-248 is only the second neutron-star transient whose quiescent spectrum is dominated by the hard component (SAX J1808.4-3658 is the other one). We discuss possible explanations for this unusual behavior of EXO 1745-248, its relationship to other quiescent neutron-star systems, and the impact of our results on understanding quiescent X-ray binaries. We also discuss the implications of our results on the way the low-luminosity X-ray sources in globular clusters are classified.Comment: Accepted by ApJ Main Journal, September 22, 2004. Figure 2 is a color figur

Faint X-ray Sources in the Globular Cluster Terzan 5

We report our analysis of a Chandra X-ray observation of the rich globular cluster Terzan 5, in which we detect 50 sources to a limiting 1.0-6 keV X-ray luminosity of 3*10^{31} ergs/s within the half-mass radius of the cluster. Thirty-three of these have L_X>10^{32} ergs/s, the largest number yet seen in any globular cluster. In addition to the quiescent low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB, identified by Wijnands et al.), another 12 relatively soft sources may be quiescent LMXBs. We compare the X-ray colors of the harder sources in Terzan 5 to the Galactic Center sources studied by Muno and collaborators, and find the Galactic Center sources to have harder X-ray colors, indicating a possible difference in the populations. We cannot clearly identify a metallicity dependence in the production of low-luminosity X-ray binaries in Galactic globular clusters, but a metallicity dependence of the form suggested by Jordan et al. for extragalactic LMXBs is consistent with our data.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures (3 color). Resubmitted to ApJ after incorporating referee comments. v2: Added references to introductio

Discovery of Radio Outbursts in the Active Nucleus of M81

The low-luminosity active galactic nucleus of M81 has been monitored at centimeter wavelengths since early 1993 as a by-product of radio programs to study the radio emission from Supernova 1993J. The extensive data sets reveal that the nucleus experienced several radio outbursts during the monitoring period. At 2 and 3.6 cm, the main outburst occurred roughly in the beginning of 1993 September and lasted for approximately three months; at longer wavelengths, the maximum flux density decreases, and the onset of the burst is delayed. These characteristics qualitatively resemble the standard model for adiabatically expanding radio sources, although certain discrepancies between the observations and the theoretical predictions suggest that the model is too simplistic. In addition to the large-amplitude, prolonged variations, we also detected milder changes in the flux density at 3.6 cm and possibly at 6 cm on short (less than 1 day) timescales. We discuss a possible association between the radio activity and an optical flare observed during the period that the nucleus was monitored at radio wavelengths.Comment: To appear in The Astronomical Journal. Latex, 18 pages including embedded figures and table

Continued Neutron Star Crust Cooling of the 11 Hz X-Ray Pulsar in Terzan 5: A Challenge to Heating and Cooling Models?

The transient neutron star low-mass X-ray binary and 11 Hz X-ray pulsar IGR J17480-2446 in the globular cluster Terzan 5 exhibited an 11-week accretion outburst in 2010. Chandra observations performed within five months after the end of the outburst revealed evidence that the crust of the neutron star became substantially heated during the accretion episode and was subsequently cooling in quiescence. This provides the rare opportunity to probe the structure and composition of the crust. Here, we report on new Chandra observations of Terzan 5 that extend the monitoring to ~2.2 yr into quiescence. We find that the thermal flux and neutron star temperature have continued to decrease, but remain significantly above the values that were measured before the 2010 accretion phase. This suggests that the crust has not thermally relaxed yet, and may continue to cool. Such behavior is difficult to explain within our current understanding of heating and cooling of transiently accreting neutron stars. Alternatively, the quiescent emission may have settled at a higher observed equilibrium level (for the same interior temperature), in which case the neutron star crust may have fully cooled.Comment: Accepted to ApJ without revision. Updated references and fixed few typos to match published version. 7 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

SN1993J VLBI (I): The Center of the Explosion and a Limit on Anisotropic Expansion

Phase-referenced VLBI observations of supernova 1993J at 24 epochs, from 50 days after shock breakout to the present, allowed us to determine the coordinates of the explosion center relative to the quasi-stationary core of the host galaxy M81 with an accuracy of 45 micro-arcsec, and to determine the nominal proper motion of the geometric center of the radio shell with an accuracy of 9micro-arcsec/yr. The uncertainties correspond to 160 AU for the position and 160 km/s for the proper motion at the distance of the source of 3.63 Mpc. After correcting for the expected galactic proper motion of the supernova around the core of M81 using HI rotation curves, we obtain a peculiar proper motion of the radio shell center of only 320 +/- 160 km/s to the south, which limits any possible one-sided expansion of the shell. We also find that the shell is highly circular, the outer contours in fact being circular to within 3%. Combining our proper motion values with the degree of circular symmetry, we find that the expansion of the shockfront from the explosion center is isotropic to within 5.5% in the plane of the sky. This is a more fundamental result on isotropic expansion than can be derived from the circularity of the images alone. The brightness of the radio shell, however, varies along the ridge and systematically changes with time. The degree of isotropy in the expansion of the shockfront contrasts with the asymmetries and polarization found in optical spectral lines. Asymmetric density distributions in the ejecta or more likely in the circumstellar medium, are favored to reconcile the radio and optical results. We see no sign of any disk-like density distribution of the circumstellar material, with the average axis ratio of the radio shell of SN1993J being less than 1.04.Comment: 21 pages, LaTex + 5 Figures (encapulsated PostScript), Accepted for Publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Predictions of Gamma-ray Emission from Globular Cluster Millisecond Pulsars Above 100 MeV

The recent Fermi detection of the globular cluster (GC) 47 Tucanae highlighted the importance of modeling collective gamma-ray emission of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) in GCs. Steady flux from such populations is also expected in the very high energy (VHE) domain covered by ground-based Cherenkov telescopes. We present pulsed curvature radiation (CR) as well as unpulsed inverse Compton (IC) calculations for an ensemble of MSPs in the GCs 47 Tucanae and Terzan 5. We demonstrate that the CR from these GCs should be easily detectable for Fermi, while constraints on the total number of MSPs and the nebular B-field may be derived using the IC flux components.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ