Floating Minds: How Young Adult Fiction Represents Forgetting in Old Age and Adolescence

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Alison Waller
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Cognitive Decline ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Older Age ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
The One ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Queer Phenomenology

YA novels increasingly tell stories about memory loss, from adolescent amnesia to cognitive decline in older age. This article examines the representation of forgetting in Jenny Downham's Unbecoming, Clare Furniss's How Not to Disappear, and Emily Barr's The One Memory of Flora Banks. Drawing on liberatory psychology, queer phenomenology, and theories of creative embodiment, it argues that dominant narratives of dementia and ageing might be challenged by analysing symbolic scenes of floating and falling.

Cognitive change before old age (11 to 70) predicts cognitive change after old age (70 to 82)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federica Conte ◽  
Judith Okely ◽  
Olivia Hamilton ◽  
Janie Corley ◽  
Danielle Page ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Decline ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Cognitive Change ◽  
Older Age ◽  
Growth Curve Models ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Lothian Birth Cohort ◽  
Age Related Cognitive Decline

Identifying predictors of cognitive decline within older age helps to understand its mechanisms and to identify those at greater risk. Here we examine how cognitive change from 11 to 70 years is associated with cognitive change within older age (70 to 82 years) in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 longitudinal study (N=1091 at recruitment). Using latent growth curve models, we estimate rates of change from age 70 to 82 in general cognitive ability (g) and in three cognitive domains: visuospatial, memory and processing speed. g accounted for 71.3% of interindividual change variance. Greater 11-70 cognitive gain predicted slower decline in g over 12 subsequent years (β = .163, p = .001), independently of cognitive level at age 70, and domain-specific change beyond g. These results contribute toward identifying people at higher risk of age-related cognitive decline. Age-related cognitive decline is a significant threat to the quality of life in older age. Its economic and social impact on society will increase together with the steadily rising life expectancy. How can we preserve cognitive health in older age? Researchers have made significant advances in identifying protective and risk factors. However, most studies focus on a limited age range, and cognitive change mechanisms are not yet completely understood. This work takes advantage of almost life-spanning longitudinal data to test if cognitive trajectory across childhood and adulthood can predict cognitive trajectories in older age. Our findings show that earlier change is associated with later change. Some factors related to individual differences in cognitive change might thus operate over much of the adult life course, and certainly before older age. This knowledge can help identify individuals at higher risk of decline and understand the mechanisms and factors responsible.

Cognitive Maps and Social Ecology in Young Adult Fiction (Based on a keynote address presented at the fifth national conference of the Shiraz University Centre for Research in Children's Literature Studies, Shiraz, Iran, May 2015)

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Social Ecology ◽  
Cognitive Mapping ◽  
Mapping Function ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Ya Fiction ◽  
The Graveyard Book ◽  
The One

The nexus of the conceptual domains of cognitive mapping and social ecology offers a constructive methodology for examining some aspects of Young Adult fiction, and in this article I explore what I see as the possibilities of this conjunction. On the one hand, social ecology (also referred to as ecocultural theory or the bioecological model) impacts upon representations of subjectivity within YA fiction, and on the other, the literal and metaphorical interpretations of space and place enabled by cognitive mapping function as a framework to structure discussion of the relationship between ecology and subjectivity. Because mapping is an activity performed both by characters within the text and through narrator–narratee transactions, it has a narrative function that mediates the core social ecology foci of proximal processes, characterisation, ecocultural orientation and the experience of temporality. Taking examples from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, David Almond's The Fire-Eaters and John Green's Paper Towns, the article explores some of the interactions between key cognitive and social processes and the narrative structures within which they are expressed.

Creating a ‘Masala’ Self: Bicultural Identity in Desi Young Adult Novels

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Superle
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young People ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Small Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Young Adult Fiction ◽  
Bicultural Identity ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Institutional Forces ◽  
Cultural Identity Development

In the past two decades, the previously silent voices of diasporic Indian writers for young people have emerged, and a small body of texts has begun to develop in the United States and the United Kingdom. One of the major preoccupations of these texts is cultural identity development, especially in the novels published for a young adult audience, which often feature protagonists in the throes of an identity crisis. For example, the novels The Roller Birds of Rampur (1991) by Indi Rana, Born Confused (2002) by Tanuja Desai Hidier, and The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen (2005) by Mitali Perkins all focus on an adolescent girl coping with her bicultural identity with angst and confusion, and delineate the ways her self-concept and relationships are affected. The texts are empowering in their suggestion that young people have the agency to explore and create their own balanced bicultural identities, but like other young adult fiction, they ultimately situate adolescents within insurmountable institutional forces that are much more powerful than any individual.

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

scholarly journals The Role of Stressful Childhood Experiences in Shaping Later-Life Memory Loss Among Black and White U.S. Adults

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 296-296
Author(s):  
Caroline Hartnett
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Decline ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Behavioral Risk ◽  
Black Adults ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
White Children ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Stressful Experiences ◽  
White Adults

Abstract Cognitive decline common in the U.S. and greatly impacts quality of life, both for those who experience it and for those who care for them. Black Americans experience higher burdens of cognitive decline but the mechanisms underlying this disparity have not been fully elucidated. Stress experienced in early life is a promising explanatory factor, since stress and cognition are linked, childhood stressors been shown to have a range of negative implications later in life, and Black children experience more childhood stressors than White children, on average. In this paper, we use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to examine whether stressful experiences in childhood help explain Black-White disparities in memory loss. These data were available for 5 state-years between 2011 and 2017 (n=11,708). Preliminary results indicate that, while stressful childhood experiences are strongly associated with memory loss, stressful experiences do not mediate the association between race and memory loss. However, race does appear to moderate the association between stressful childhood experiences and memory loss. Specifically, stressful experiences are associated with a higher likelihood of memory loss for Black adults compared to White adults.In addition, there seem to be some noteworthy patterns across different types of experiences (i.e. parental drinking may predict later memory loss more strongly for Black adults than White adults, but parental hitting may predict memory loss more strongly for White adults than Black adults).

scholarly journals Annuity Markets and Capital Accumulation

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shantanu Bagchi ◽  
James A. Feigenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Capital Stock ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Substitution Effect ◽  
Income Effect ◽  
Substitution Effects ◽  
Income Effects ◽  
Annuity Markets ◽  
The One

AbstractWe examine how the absence of annuities in financial markets affects capital accumulation in a two-period overlapping generations model. Our findings indicate that the effect on capital is ambiguous in general equilibrium, because there are two competing mechanisms at work. On the one hand, the absence of annuities increases the price of old-age consumption relative to the price of early-life consumption. This induces a substitution effect that reduces saving and capital, and an income effect that has the opposite effect as households want to consume less when young, causing them to save more. On the other hand, accidental bequests originate from the assets of the deceased under missing annuity markets. The bequest received in early life always has a positive income effect on saving, but the bequest received in old age, conditional on survival, is effectively a partial annuity with both substitution and income effects. We find that when the desire to smooth consumption is high, the income effects dominate, so the capital stock always increases when annuity markets are missing. However, when the desire to smooth consumption is low, the substitution effects dominate, and the capital stock decreases with missing annuity markets.

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