In this phenomenological study, we investigated the lived experiences of ambiguous loss among family members following the February 6, 2023 earthquakes in Turkiye. We explored how they processed the loss, reconstructed their identities, and related to their social environment and future. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fourteen family members who experienced ambiguous loss. We anaylzed the transcribed interviews using content Analysis. The analysis identified four key themes: Process; Others; Effects; and Self, Family, and Life Roles. Although most participants eventually received confirmation of the death of their loved ones and received their bodies, the initial period of uncertainty caused significant emotional distress and a complicated grieving period. Participants reported intense emotional suffering, but they also described gradual coping through meaning-making and emotional adaptation over time. The findings underscore that ambiguous loss functions as a distinct and particularly debilitating form of grief, where the initial uncertainty may disrupt the mourning process. The findings highlight the critical need for support systems and interventions that address this type of unique trauma and foster long-term adaptive coping strategies.

Prolonged grief and psychological distress among the public amidst the ongoing hostage crisis following the october 7 attack.

In this article, I trace my siblings’ reactions to an autoethnography I wrote about our father, a religious leader and public figure. Six years after my father passed away, I published an autoethnography describing his decline until his death. The publication received very positive feedback from the general public, but negative reactions from my siblings that were incomprehensible to me. Following Joy Castro, I suggest that “too big, too painful things” underlie the unspoken opposition from my siblings.1 Based on interviews I conducted with children of other rabbis, I propose that writing an autoethnography about a parent who is a religious and public leader may be perceived as an act of appropriating the father’s legacy, or even a claim to the role of successor and heir. Additionally, publishing an autoethnography about a parent may evoke in the siblings a sense of ambiguous loss: Pain for a father who was physically present at home, but emotionally unavailable to his children. Finally, I describe the motivation behind my decision to write and publish the story about my father. I argue that, at times, a dominant narrative becomes entrenched within a family. Occasionally, a “deliberate stumble” is required to disrupt and challenge this singular family narrative. Such disruption may cause discomfort and resistance in family members, but, at the same time, can also make room for alternative narratives to be heard and told.

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly since ChatGPT's launch in December 2022, has transformed academic journal writing while introducing significant ethical challenges to scholarly publishing. This systematic literature review (SLR), adhering to PRISMA 2020 guidelines, examined 44 peer-reviewed studies (2021-2025) to comprehensively assess the ethical dimensions of AI-assisted academic writing. Analysis reveals that 96.7% of reviewed literature expresses substantial ethical concerns related to AI use, including plagiarism risks, loss of originality, authorship ambiguity, and AI-generated hallucinations. With 66.7% of studies focusing explicitly on generative AI and a sharp increase in publications in 2025, these findings confirm the urgent relevance of this issue. Key findings indicate a fundamental redefinition of academic authenticity in AI-mediated writing, alongside a critical gap between institutional policies and actual practices. Publisher analysis reveals that only 20-30% of major publishers maintain comprehensive AI policies, while 30-50% lack formal guidance, creating regulatory fragmentation. Technical detection safeguards remain inadequate, with real-world accuracy averaging 26% despite claimed 94-99% performance, and 60.9% of detection research employing fragmented methods. Notably, fewer than 26% of ethical recommendations are consistently implemented in practice, highlighting a persistent theory-practice gap. The review identifies eight critical research gaps requiring urgent attention: robust verification methods, psychological factors in ethical decision-making, discipline-specific guidelines, longitudinal impact assessment, global harmonization frameworks, faculty AI literacy, institutional sustainability, and assessment method adaptation. Recommendations converge on an integrated, principle-based approach emphasizing mandatory transparency and disclosure of AI use, sustained ethics education and AI literacy, adaptive discipline-specific frameworks, and meaningful human oversight. Rather than relying solely on detection-based enforcement, the literature advocates transparency-based approaches and ethical literacy as more effective long-term solutions for ensuring academic integrity in the AI era.

As Alzheimer's Disease progresses, individuals gradually lose access to their autobiographical memories, shared histories, and the ability to recognize their loved ones, profoundly affecting the marital intimacy and interdependence that define spousal relationships. This abstract proposes the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) as a memory‐preserving and meaning‐making companion for spouse caregivers navigating the ambiguous loss associated with their loved one's cognitive decline.By integrating natural language processing, machine learning, and digital archiving, an AI‐driven system could store and organize key life events, personal narratives, shared symbols and memories, and intimate conversations that have shaped the couple's relationship. The AI would function as an interactive repository, enabling caregivers to access and revisit their spouse's recorded thoughts, voices, and reflections, thereby preserving the emotional essence of their bond even as cognitive decline progresses.This technology could offer personalized support through reminiscence‐based interactions, guiding caregivers through past conversations and adapting responses based on prior exchanges. Additionally, it could generate therapeutic storytelling experiences, reinforcing the caregiver's emotional connection to their loved one while mitigating feelings of isolation and grief. By capturing the co‐constructed meanings and intimate history between partners, AI may serve as both a coping tool during the caregiving journey and a means of maintaining connection as the spouse with dementia gradually loses cognitive function.Ethical considerations—including consent, data privacy, and the psychological effects of AI‐mediated memory preservation—must be carefully examined to ensure that such technology complements rather than complicates the caregiving process. This proposal presents an innovative perspective on AI's role in Alzheimer's caregiving, extending beyond clinical and logistical support to address the profound emotional and relational losses experienced by spouse caregivers, ultimately offering a bridge between the past and the present in the face of memory erosion.

This paper examines how the theory of ambiguous loss offers a more comprehensive explanation to the unresolved grief experienced by Third Culture Kids (TCK). While existing literature focuses on mobility, multicultural identity, and cultural adaptation, it often fails to address the reoccurring, unprocessed losses produced by repeated migrations. Bosss two forms of ambiguous loss, physical absence with psychological presence and psychological absence with physical presence, demonstrates TCKs uncertainty in grief processing for their separated interpersonal, cultural, social and emotional connections. These losses are often overlooked by the TCK themselves, creating boundary ambiguity, and uncertainty in loss and grief processing. The paper proses Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) as an empirically grounded intervention cultivating psychological flexibility, value-based behavior that is continuous regardless of physical location, fostering active transition for TCKs and stronger emotional support system within their family. By integrating ambiguous loss theory with TCKs psychological research, this paper reframes TCKs distress not as individual failures, but as a predictable reaction to chronic, unaddressed loss, offering implications for therapeutic paradigm, and supports offered by international schools and business to TCK families.

ABSTRACT Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD) profoundly influence the health of individuals and their affected family members (AFMs). In this study, the authors examined key factors influencing AFMs, grounded in ambiguous loss and relational frame theory. 310 AFMs completed online surveys via MTurk. Findings revealed that psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, and boundary ambiguity accounted for 61.2% of the variance in distress outcomes among AFMs (R2 = .612, F(3, 304) = 162.114, p < .000). Additionally, psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, and boundary ambiguity explained 24.1% of the variance in resilience outcomes (R2 = .241, F(3, 303) = 33.467, p < .000).

For more than half a century, the people of Cyprus have reported missing family members to the authorities. Not knowing the fate of a loved one who disappeared during ethnic clashes led families into a state of ambiguous loss, a condition known to cause significant psychological stress. The main goal was to investigate role of identification and funeral process related experience in explaining variance in psychological distress, while controlling for psychosocial variables. Using a cross-sectional design, with total sample size of 898, the study involved two participant groups: Turkish Cypriots (TC) and Greek Cypriots (GC). Separate hierarchical regressions were conducted to examine predictors of psychological distress in both groups. When gender, resilience, perceived injustice, social support, relationship to the missing person (first-degree vs. second-degree), and coping scores were controlled for, experiences related to identification process negatively predicted psychological distress, whereas experiences related to funeral process positively predicted psychological distress in TC group. In contrast, when psychosocial variables were controlled for, experiences related to identification process positively predicted psychological distress, while experiences related to funeral process negatively predicted psychological distress in GC group. These divergent findings regarding identification and funeral processes suggest a potential influence of sociocultural and political factors. These findings highlighted the prolonged psychological distress experienced by both TC and GC family members of identified missing persons. It is considered essential to provide psychosocial support to the families even after the identification process, taking into account cultural, political, religious, and ethnic considerations and needs of each community.

Exploring refugee loss, trauma, and identity through ambiguous loss theory.

Supplemental Material for Exploring Refugee Loss, Trauma, and Identity Through Ambiguous Loss Theory

ABSTRACT The theory of ambiguous loss is a psychosocial theory born out of my interdisciplinary interests and training in human development, family science, psychology, sociology, and psychiatry/family therapy. Historically, qualitative and mixed methods advanced this theory; today, an ambiguous loss scale is wanted. What can and cannot be measured? Why are perceptions of ambiguous loss quantifiable while the phenomenon itself is not? Recommendations and critical aspects are presented for new generations who hopefully will further theory development. Instead of the usual epistemological questions about truth and measurement, we ask, “How do people left behind perceive the agonizing stress of missing loved ones?” The goal of ambiguous loss intervention is not to cure or fix (because we cannot), but paradoxically, to build enough resilience in those left behind to move forward with life despite unanswered questions. Today, this theory is applied globally; novel applications are emerging.

Enforced disappearance inflicts severe psychological trauma not only on victims but also on their families and communities, leaving them in a state of ambiguous loss. However, studies on the impact of mass kidnapping on families during armed conflict remain scarce. This study examined the lived experience of families of Israeli hostages abducted to Gaza during the October 7, 2023, attack and how they perceived and constructed their experiences within a socioecological context amid warfare and geopolitical uncertainty. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 18 family members of hostages. Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis was used to examine their evolving experiences. Six core themes emerged, illustrating the intensity, simultaneity, and prolonged nature of their lived experience: (a) managing private trauma within national trauma, (b) enduring dynamic-static ambiguous loss, (c) fighting for return, (d) building collective solidarity, (e) bearing the toll on health and functioning, and (f) maintaining bonds with the hostage in captivity. These themes were situated within four interrelated levels: (a) individual, (b) family (c) community and society, and (d) nation. The trauma of mass kidnapping during war is compounded by multiple losses, displacement, and perceived state abandonment. This study extends ambiguous loss theory by demonstrating its shift from an individual to a collective, sociopolitical phenomenon. It exemplifies how, in such contexts, ambiguous loss can be shaped by outgroup and ingroup triggers, fueling dynamic emotional fluctuations despite temporal stagnation. Findings highlight the need for a socioecological approach to guide policymakers and therapeutic interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study explores the socio-political grounding of ambiguous loss through newspaper reports on individuals searching for relatives after the 2023 Türkiye earthquake. Data comprises 505 news articles analyzed via deductive thematic analysis iln MAXQDA 2024. Three themes emerged: “socio-political context of the determination of the experience of ambiguous loss”, “Search strategies in a socio-political context”, and “Legal endings and demands”. Findings reveal that ambiguous loss and related emotions, often seen as psychological, are shaped by institutional relationships with hospitals and police, highlighting their socio-political nature. Similarly, legal systems play a central role in defining “missing persons” and regulating access to legal mechanisms. The demands for DNA matching, research commissions, and rubble searches emphasize institutional intervention’s necessity. Recommendations include developing measures for disaster-related missing persons, creating community-based interventions, and providing psychosocial support addressing disaster experiences and ambiguous loss.

While existing studies document physical and economic impacts of new-build gentrification, the temporally protracted trauma of indirect displacement in communities adjacent to redeveloped areas remains understudied. Employing constructivist grounded theory, this study asks the following question: how do residents experience place attachment erosion during prolonged policy suspension in Shanghai’s new-build gentrification? Through iterative analysis of 25 interviews, we reveal a temporal vicious cycle of waiting triggered by uneven redevelopment and policy inertia. This cycle systematically dismantles belonging through several mechanisms: (1) chronic place-identity deterioration; (2) progressive social network fragmentation; (3) the collapse of imagined futures; and (4) the ambiguous loss of place attachment—where physical presence coexists with psychological disengagement. Crucially, we redefine indirect displacement as a temporal erosion of place identity and attachment, revealing a paradoxical state of physical presence coexisting with psychological disengagement. This paper provides a new perspective for better understanding the different dimensions of indirect displacement in new-build gentrification, which will help inform equitable development efforts that are more inclusive and just.

The study examines on two influential works from contemporary Kashmir, The Half Widow (2012) by Shafi Ahmed and The Half Mother (2014) by Shahnaz Bashir. Drawing upon trauma theory, feminist literary criticism and postcolonial discourse, this research explores how these narratives illuminate the creation of ‘fractured selves’ among women affected by enforced disappearances during the Kashmir conflict. This study demonstrates that both authors use novel narrative techniques – such as temporal disruption, embodied metaphors and fragmented memory – to create an image of the psychological and social implications of ambiguous loss. These texts illustrate how women’s identities become contested places where personal trauma is intertwined with collective memory and political resistance. Through close reading of texts and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this research suggests that these stories are not solely accounts of suffering but also serve as epistemic forms of resistance that challenge the official discourse on the Kashmir conflict. The findings contribute to understanding how literature preserves marginalized experiences and expands trauma theory beyond Western contexts This article highlights how concepts like ‘half-widow’ and ‘half mother’ represent liminal identities that resist traditional categories while creating new forms of female agency within the framework of limitations. In the context of war, this study highlights the importance of women’s narratives in documenting the impact of conflict and preserving cultural memory.

This paper explores suicidality and suicide research from an autoethnographic analysis framed through grief concepts. Self-identifying as a Muslim in the United States, the author explains how lived experiences being racialized through Islamophobia, identifying as a genderfluid non-binary woman, being socially biracial, holding a postpartum bipolar diagnosis, and being connected to a diaspora, are critical elements to develop a deeper sociocultural understanding of suicide. Grief concepts that are used to analyze these themes include disenfranchised grief, ambiguous loss, anticipatory grief, and secondary loss. While these grief concepts are understood as part of the author’s embodied lived experience as an individual, there is also a collective grief that is explored through the author’s bilingual experience with Arabic as it relates to the topics of suicide and genocide occurring in the Arabic-speaking diaspora located in Gaza, Palestine. A conceptual framework is offered to make sense of the author’s lived experience by both incorporating and challenging existing academic perspectives on suicide and research. The emic, or insider, perspective is contextualized such that it may hold implications beyond the individual author, such as for U.S. Muslims and other hard-to-reach populations. A positionality statement demonstrates the author’s reflexivity of being an insider ‘participant’–researcher in conducting transformative research approaches with the U.S. Muslim community. Further directions are shared for scholars with lived experience who may seek to utilize comparable individual or collaborative autoethnographic approaches with such majority-world communities.

Many North Korean defectors left their family members behind in North Korea and now live with the ambiguous loss of loved ones. Unresolved ambiguous loss can commonly lead to psychological distress, but it can also result in positive adjustment outcomes. However, research on the mechanisms underlying the relationship between ambiguous loss and post-separation growth among North Korean defectors is insufficient. We examined the relationship between ambiguous loss and post-­separation growth and whether continuing bonds with separated family members can serve as a protective buffer in this relationship among 100 North Korean defector women who left family behind in North Korea. We found that ambiguous loss was negatively associated with post-separation growth, and this association was strengthened when continuing bonds were low. The findings suggest strengthening continuing bonds can mitigate the impact of ambiguous loss. By identifying a mechanism that promotes adjustment among North Korean defector families in the context of family separation, this study suggests future directions for interventions and preventive strategies for this population.

Literary Witnessing of Ambiguous Loss in Ukraine

The study examined the struggles of the kidnappees’ families and their helpers through two theoretical concepts: ambiguous loss and frozen time. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with three key groups: family members of hostages (n = 5), professional caregivers (n = 2), and former diplomats (n = 3) who assisted the families in establishing international connections to facilitate the kidnappees’ release. Our findings revealed three overlapping temporal dimensions: Parallel Time (simultaneous hope and despair), Presumed Dead Time (gradual acceptance of possible death), and Perpetual Time (endless uncertainty). We introduced the concepts of “stolen time” (irretrievable lost moments) and “frozen time” (psychological immobilization), and documented a significant ripple effect, where families’ temporal distress extended outward to affect supporting professionals and systems. This research advances theoretical understanding of ambiguous loss as not merely an individual experience but a dynamic, socially-embedded phenomenon that disrupts temporal perception in multiple circles of proximity. The study has implications for professional training, institutional support systems, and policy development for service providers working with families experiencing unresolved trauma and loss.

Abstract Accurate and dense scene depth perception is critical for applications such as autonomous driving and robotic navigation. However, due to the limited geometric cues provided by inherently sparse depth data acquired from sensors, significant challenges remain in completing depth information by integrating monocular RGB images to reconstruct object depth in a coherent 3D space. Traditional data augmentation strategies lack geometric awareness, often causing depth discontinuities at the foreground-background boundaries, leading to edge blurring and artifacts that distort geometric relationships in mixed regions. Additionally, mainstream depth estimation frameworks focus too much on global features, making it difficult to model the complex spatial relationships between foreground objects and the background, resulting in the loss of foreground details and ambiguity in background depth. To address these challenges, we propose a hierarchical geometric-aware depth completion network (HGAN) that consists of two key modules: the geometric consistency-aware enhancement module (GCAM) and the geometric relationship decomposition modeling module (GRDM). Specifically, the GCAM constructs a geometric consistency map between the foreground and background regions based on depth similarity and employs adaptive weights to guide foreground-background feature fusion. This enhances the boundary modeling capabilities, significantly improving the structural clarity and continuity of the depth map. The GRDM introduces a geometric relationship decomposition mechanism that explicitly separates depth feature mapping into two orthogonal subspaces: Range Space and Null Space. The Range Space models global scene consistency constraints, ensuring the structural coherence of depth estimation, whereas the Null Space focuses on reconstructing local residual details, effectively enhancing the perception of foreground object edges and fine details. The experimental results show that our method outperforms previous approaches in terms of both efficiency and accuracy on the KITTI and NYU-Depth V2 datasets, with HGAN reducing RMSE by 7.5% on KITTI and 2.3% on NYUv2 compared to CompletionFormer.