Uncanny Phenomenon: Existential Experiences among Iranian International Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the number of Iranian international students in Canada continues to increase in the light of the recent socio-political unrests in Iran, studying the acculturation experiences of this population has become increasingly important for providing effective counselling. The existing literature on adjustment of international students has been critiqued for pathologizing the acculturation challenges of this population, while neglecting their underlying existential importance. Existential concerns, which reflect individuals’ conflicts with death anxiety, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom, have been universally identified as a fundamental concern of humanity (Yalom, 1980). Cross-cultural transitions can provoke existential concerns since the challenges of acculturation can often touch on underlying existential meanings. In this study, I conducted semi-structured interviews with six Iranian international students to explore the existential inquiries that arose during acculturation. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al., 2009) of participants’ experiences resulted in three overarching themes: (a) Migration as a Boundary Situation, (b) Facing Existential Concerns, and (c) Coping with Existential Concerns. I discuss these findings within the context of acculturation literature and present implications for counsellors and researchers in the field of counselling psychology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".