Death Studies最新文献

Parents who experience the trauma of losing an only child are called "shidu" parents in China. There are individual differences in post-loss outcomes.1,061 Chinese shidu parents were asked to complete questionnaires assessing prolonged grief, post-traumatic stress, and depressive symptoms. The mean age of the sample was 59.68 (SD = 7.52), with the average time since the loss was 9.46 years (SD = 7.05). Most participants were female (62.3%). The main cause of the loss was an unnatural case (52.7%). Latent profile analysis was used to identify similar symptom patterns. Network analysis was used to explore the relationships among symptoms within different subgroups. A two-profile model based on symptom severity identified a "low symptom severity" subgroup (n = 419) and a "high symptom severity" subgroup (n = 642). In the low symptom severity subgroup network, the most central symptoms were loss of interest, feeling numb, and meaninglessness. In the high symptom severity subgroup network, the most central symptoms were physiological cue reactivity, emotional pain, and feeling easily startled. Individual differences in the post-loss outcomes of Chinese shidu parents are reflected not only in symptom patterns but also in the relationships among symptoms.

End-of-life care options in Australia, recently including Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD), are available to people in prison. Little is known about how the public perceives this right. We aimed to identify the attitudes of the public by conducting a qualitative content analysis of comments across four Australian online news media outlets discussing the first case of a person in prison being granted VAD (a sexual offender). From 434 comments, we identified four overarching categories: not punished enough; unsupportive of VAD; approving of VAD; and negative characteristics of VAD recipient and other stakeholders involved. Most comments were punitive, highlighting the opinion that VAD was escaping punishment and reflected a tension between the rights of the individual versus the perceived rights of the community. We highlight the risks these attitudes can pose in terms of providing end-of-life care to people in prisons.

While much attention is paid to what happens to dead bodies after political violence, disaster, or atrocity, less attention has been paid to body parts, despite the wide-ranging efforts, both material (often forensic) and discursive, to reconstitute or resuscitate the whole dead body. Materializing the whole body is often considered key to truth-telling mechanisms and for closure for family members of the missing and dead, thus the body part is often posited as a problem in need of a solution. We are seeing, largely due to advances in forensic technologies, an increasing belief that all body parts can be identified and distinguished from other materials, and should, therefore, be recovered and repatriated to the whole body in its death. To explore this dynamic, I make two key arguments. First, I suggest that reassembling bodies is framed as a mechanism of re-subjectification that is key to reconciliation and justice after political violence. A body part is an object, but a dead body is in most contexts still considered a subject, even dead, so putting a dead body back together is considered re-humanizing and gives the dead body back its political agency. Second, I suggest that when this cannot be done materially due to the obstacles posed by modern warfare, we often see governance techniques that seek to do so discursively.

On April 18, 2015, a fishing vessel was shipwrecked between Libya and Italy. The tragedy was the result of Italian and European border policies. More than 1,100 people (from across Africa and the Indian subcontinent) lost their lives in the vessel, making it the largest recorded civilian massacre to have occurred in the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond the huge number of dead, what distinguishes the shipwreck are the processes of the "translation" of its human and material remains, involving their displacement, material transformation and re-signification. In this paper, I summarize these processes in four stages, intertwining the vessel and the bodies of those who died inside it: their exhumation, naming, wake (whether artistic or forensic) and, finally, burial. By analyzing the work of translating the boat and bodies, and exploring what can be expressed through their different materialities, I show their intense social and political life, which led various actors involved to claim ownership over mourning. By delineating the mirrored relationship between the bodies and the boat, this article demonstrates the contribution death studies can make to the analysis of migration debris on the one hand, and, on the other, how tracing the social life of boats in the aftermath of migrant shipwrecks can enrich an analysis of the political life of border deaths.

Grievers recall memories from both the life of the deceased and the dying days, but differences in recall across these memory types are not well-characterized. In this study, 100 bereaved German adults described up to ten important memories of a deceased close other (M = 7.86). Memories from the dying days were classified into: final memories, health transition events, last time events, and temporal markers. Among those who provided at least one dying days memory (73%), these memories were reported to be recalled privately and shared socially more often than memories from the deceased's life. Memories from the dying days were rated as less emotionally positive than those from the life, and contextual factors from the loss shaped memory recall frequency and emotional valence. Results underscore the need for appropriate end-of-life care to lay a foundation for adaptive remembering and suggest the relevance of dying days memories in therapeutic settings.

The prompts "What emotions does the thought of your own death arouse in you?" and "What will happen to you when your body dies?" have been used to induce anxiety in Terror Management Theory. The current study investigated how the responses to these prompts may reveal cross-national differences by using a text-mining approach. Undergraduates in the US (n = 298) and Japan (n = 212) participated in the study. Across both groups, anxiety was the most common emotion. Cross-national differences also emerged, such that students in the US were more likely to mention sadness, funeral, and religiosity for the first prompt, and acceptance, spiritual change, and religiosity for the second prompt. Students in Japan were more likely to mention regret for the first, and sadness, emptiness, and funeral for the second prompt. Results revealed differences and similarities in thoughts and emotions people associate with when thinking about own death.

Insurgents' funerals play a significant role in the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish insurgent group PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) for both parties. This article examines the dual features of the insurgents' funerals. While the Kurdish population seeks to reintegrate the dead into larger narratives of the "Kurdish liberation movement" and use funerals as a site for mobilization, the regime portrays the social and political lives of the dead manifested in the funerals as a matter of security and integrates them into larger security discourses. Kurdish mayors and deputies were dismissed from office and imprisoned for organizing and attending these funerals, and even for publicly displaying grief. In this article, I demonstrate how the social and political life of the dead that survives the biological death can still remain in the language and practices of security, and argue that securitization of funerals have a broader implication of leaving no space for the Kurdish Question to exist except for the realm of security.

The study investigated the effect of grief cognitions on grief and meaning reconstruction levels and explored how sociodemographic factors and loss-related variables relate to these outcomes, using a sample of 155 older bereaved spouses in Türkiye. The sample for the study, which used a relational screening model, consisted of 155 participants aged 60 and over from Çankaya district of Ankara. Data were collected using the socio-demographic information form, the grief cognition questionnaire, and the grief and meaning reconstruction inventory. Spearman correlation analyses were conducted to evaluate the correlations between variables, and multiple and hierarchical regression analyses were performed to ascertain the predictors of the scales. The analysis revealed a negative correlation between grief cognitions and grief and meaning reconstruction levels. Expectedness of death and the time elapsed since the spouse's death were predictors of both grief cognitions and levels of grief and meaning reconstruction.

This study explores the phenomenon of memorial stickers commemorating victims of the October 7, 2023, massacre and subsequent Israel-Hamas war. Analyzing 600 stickers collected across Israel, we examine how these artifacts shape personal and collective memory of these tragic events. Using content analysis, visual data analysis, and ethnography of texts, we investigate the stickers' distribution, textual content, and visual elements. Three key findings emerged: (1) The widespread distribution of stickers expands commemoration beyond cemeteries, creating a larger community of remembrance; (2) Diverse textual content, from personal traits to universal messages, aims to keep the deceased's values alive in social awareness; (3) Visual elements balance public recognition with private mourning through strategic use of photographs, colors, and barcodes. Drawing on theories of collective memory and continuing bonds, we argue that these stickers symbolically bring the deceased into daily life and public spaces, contributing to the processing of personal and national trauma.

The association between child loss and frailty has rarely been explored. This study aimed to examine the association between child loss and frailty, with attention to variations by the timing and frequency of the loss. Data were drawn from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, including 11,189 participants aged 45 and above. The impact of child loss on frailty was assessed through linear mixed models, and mediation analysis was conducted with the Karlson-Holm-Breen method. Results indicated that bereaved parents exhibited higher frailty levels than non-bereaved parents. The effect of child loss on frailty varied by the timing of the loss and followed a dose-response relationship. Mediation analysis revealed that life satisfaction and social engagement mediated this relationship. Moreover, mothers experienced a faster progression of frailty than fathers following child loss. These findings show that child loss predicts frailty and call for early intervention.