Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) in Acute Adult Psychiatry: A Mixed Methods study

This study explores the therapeutic mechanisms of Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) in an in-patient setting for acute adult psychiatry through the qualitative dynamics of movement and the symbolic and metaphoric processes expressed during DMP sessions. Previous research has focussed on efficacy of DMP in relation to psychosis spectrum disorders, but there is little research on the mechanisms of DMP or the specific role of the moving body. The practitioner-researcher delivered weekly group DMP sessions of 90 minutes over ten weeks on two single gender in-patient wards in an NHS hospital. The dynamics of movement were evaluated using two aspects of Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP), a movement notation instrument, related to complexity of relationships and ability to cope with the environment. The exploration of symbolic and metaphoric processes drew on self-reported questionnaires, case vignettes and psychotherapy process notes. Participants in the sessions echoed previous work in demonstrating an altered sense of space and time. Movement analysis, however, complemented previous work by indicating a specific imbalance in engaging with the future and the past. The study revealed several gender differences in the use of space and sense of self. Both men and women’s movement in the space lacked structure, a lack compensated through the movements of the practitioner-researcher. Participants expressed their sense of self differently by gender, such that men engaged more with one another as a group and women focussed more on the individual bodily self. Symbolic and metaphoric communications indicated a relationship between an altered sense of space and time, and the movement dynamics present that acted in synchronicity with the symbols and metaphors. The study draws out several implications for practice and practitioners of DMP including how to tailor intervention to help re-balance the altered sense of space and time with potential impacts on improved sense of agency

Smell and Social Life. Aspects of English, French and German Literature (1880-1939)

Literary references to smell in social contexts have a long tradition. However, the significant contribution of odour imagery to our moods and emotions goes largely unnoticed, which accounts for the comparatively late attention paid to smell in research into the significance of sensory images in literature. The wellknown capacity of smell motifs to affirm and disrupt social and aesthetic norms cuts across historical periods, but the ways in which specific literary-historical periods renew motifs of smell in social life have remained underexplored. This volume, based on the interdisciplinary conference that took place in November 2018 at the University of London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research, gives an overview of such innovations in English, French and German literature during the timespan between the ‘olfactory explosion’ in 1880 and the break-up of modern movements in 1939

Evaluation of glottal characteristics for speaker identification.

Based on the assumption that the physical characteristics of people's vocal apparatus cause their voices to have distinctive characteristics, this thesis reports on investigations into the use of the long-term average glottal response for speaker identification. The long-term average glottal response is a new feature that is obtained by overlaying successive vocal tract responses within an utterance. The way in which the long-term average glottal response varies with accent and gender is examined using a population of 352 American English speakers from eight different accent regions. Descriptors are defined that characterize the shape of the long-term average glottal response. Factor analysis of the descriptors of the long-term average glottal responses shows that the most important factor contains significant contributions from descriptors comprised of the coefficients of cubics fitted to the long-term average glottal response. Discriminant analysis demonstrates that the long-term average glottal response is potentially useful for classifying speakers according to their gender, but is not useful for distinguishing American accents. The identification accuracy of the long-term average glottal response is compared with that obtained from vocal tract features. Identification experiments are performed using a speaker database containing utterances from twenty speakers of the digits zero to nine. Vocal tract features, which consist of cepstral coefficients, partial correlation coefficients and linear prediction coefficients, are shown to be more accurate than the long-term average glottal response. Despite analysis of the training data indicating that the long-term average glottal response was uncorrelated with the vocal tract features, various feature combinations gave insignificant improvements in identification accuracy. The effect of noise and distortion on speaker identification is examined for each of the features. It is found that the identification performance of the long-term average glottal response is insensitive to noise compared with cepstral coefficients, partial correlation coefficients and the long-term average spectrum, but that it is highly sensitive to variations in the phase response of the speech transmission channel. Before reporting on the identification experiments, the thesis introduces speech production, speech models and background to the various features used in the experiments. Investigations into the long-term average glottal response demonstrate that it approximates the glottal pulse convolved with the long-term average impulse response, and this relationship is verified using synthetic speech. Furthermore, the spectrum of the long-term average glottal response extracted from pre-emphasized speech is shown to be similar to the long-term average spectrum of pre-emphasized speech, but computationally much simpler

Street Furniture and the Nation State: A Global Process

In the popular imagination, street furniture has traditionally been understood as evoking a sense of national or local identity. From Paris’ metro entrances, DDR lampposts in Berlin, and London’s york stone pavements, the designed environment has been able to contribute to the unique qualities of a place. In some instances this was deliberate. In postwar Britain for instance, the Council of Industrial Design – a state-funded design organization - often appeared to measure the quality of street furniture on the basis of its national characteristics. On other occasions, the relationship between such objects and identity emerged accidentally. In Britain during the 1980s, for example, the replacement of Gilbert Scott's red telephone box with an alternative BT model provoked considerable debate. For many people, this act was not just a Conservative attack on nationalization and state-ownership, but also on the very fabric of British identity. This understanding of street furniture has retained its currency for many years, and cities across the world have used street furniture to provide a sense of visual coherency for neighbourhoods in need of new identities, strengthening their character and improving the public's relationship to them. In this way, street furniture has been employed as a cipher for the narrative of regeneration, in which - as a means of altering the identity of a space - street furniture can project a new face upon the street. Increasingly however, advertising companies are able to lever themselves into the street furniture market by offering to provide the service to the local authorities for free in return for advertising space. In offering this service, global companies like JC Decaux, Wall and Clear Channel command a huge amount of commercial power within the city. The excessive homogenization of street furniture coupled with the overwhelming presence of advertising which is increasingly sanctioned by local authorities keen to reduce costs, has resulted in the perception of poorer quality streets. Thus, the irony of regeneration is that by seeking to promote the unique identity of a city, many places often end up looking more and more alike. This paper will examine recent developments in the process by which the street is furnished and the agents responsible. It will specifically look at how these changes have affected the relationship between street furniture and identity, and equally the effect this process has had on understandings of national design histories. Clearly, evaluating contemporary street furniture through the lens of the nation-state is of very little value, since the international differences between street furniture are considerably less marked than they used to be. This extraordinary aesthetic convergence is partly linked to economies of scale - after all, just how many different kinds of bus stop can Europe afford to have? Yet it also reflects some of the challenges posed by globalization and privatization of public space. This paper will reflect upon that process, and how these bigger narratives increasingly affect the landscape of the street