For her senior thesis, Anne Elizabeth Sidamon-Eristoff ’20 designed a collaborative project between the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute to study the impact of detention at the United States–Mexico border, parent-child separation on children’s mental health, and to determine whether pre-immigration factors exacerbated this effect. Sidamon-Eristoff was advised by Professor Javier Guerrero, Professor Catherine Peña, and also brought in Dr. Dylan Gee and her graduate student Emily Cohodes in Yale’s Department of Psychology to help design and implement this study.

This project combined a scientific approach to analyze data collected from interviews with asylum-seeking families from Central America and Mexico within one to two days upon release from US immigration detention facilities, as well as a qualitative analysis of the historical aspects of United States immigration politics and migration from Latin America to the United States.

The article published in Developmental Psychobiology titled, “Trauma exposure and mental health outcomes among Central American and Mexican children held in immigration detention at the United States–Mexico border”, is the scientific analysis of the project that Sidamon-Eristoff has continued to work on with Peña, Gee and Cohodes.

Sidamon-Eristoff is separately working with Professor Guerrero to publish the qualitative aspects of her project.

Access the full article via the Wiley Online Library.