Stigma & ‘madness’: Understanding the development of mental health themes in young adult literature and the impact upon the novelist’s creative process

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThis practice-based PhD consists of two elements: Part 1: A YA novel titled There’s Something Wrong with JJ, depicting the development of depersonalisation disorder (DPD) in a seventeen-year-old boy. The novel is intended to be a fictional yet realistic depiction of DPD drawn from an understanding of the condition through educational literature. & Part 2: Stigma & ‘Madness’: Understanding the Development of Mental Health Themes in Young Adult Literature and the Impact Upon the Novelist’s Creative Process – a research piece seeking to analyse and evaluate various portrayals of mental illness in Young Adult fiction, with a focus on depression, anxiety, dissociative states, and detachment. The thesis will look at the development of YA fiction with regards to such illnesses, considering how awareness of such illnesses has risen, more disorders have been labelled and stigmas have been broken. YA fiction often deals with these illnesses and their development through events such as, but not limited to, death, divorce, drug use, abuse during adolescence and other traumatic experiences. Therefore, YA is the primary genre within this research, though brief exploration into cross-genre works will also benefit the analysis. An investigation of the term ‘sick-lit’ and the genre will be given to understand its role in literature, the consideration of mental health subject matter by the writer, and the representation presented to a YA audience including those who are suffering with mental health conditions. The purposes of fiction will also be investigated, with consideration of profitability vs social responsibility. Self-reflection on the writing and researching process will be included at the latter stages of the research piece

Social networks and intraspeaker variation during periods of language change

Previous work has revealed general characteristics of language change at both the level of linguistic communities as well as individual speakers. What are the properties of language users such that we can account for these characteristics? To address this question, we built a computational model of a social network of language users. By holding the network structure constant and varying properties of the language users, we found that language change reflects both the structure of social networks and properties of language users. In particular, our results suggest that although language users must be capable of probabilistically accessing multiple grammars, they must prefer to access a single grammar categorically

Communicating with Cost-based Implicature: a Game-Theoretic Approach to Ambiguity

A game-theoretic approach to linguistic communication predicts that speakers can meaningfully use ambiguous forms in a discourse context in which only one of several available referents has a costly unambiguous form and in which rational interlocutors share knowledge of production costs. If a speaker produces a low-cost ambiguous form to avoid using the high-cost unambiguous form, a rational listener will infer that the high-cost entity was the intended entity, or else the speaker would not have risked ambiguity. We report data from two studies in which pairs of speakers show alignment of their use of ambiguous forms based on this kind of shared knowledge. These results extend the analysis of cost-based pragmatic inferencing beyond that previously associated only with fixed lexical hosts.

Monotonicity and Focus Sensitivity

No abstract

What's in an accent? The impact of accented synthetic speech on lexical choice in human-machine dialogue

The assumptions we make about a dialogue partner's knowledge and communicative ability (i.e. our partner models) can influence our language choices. Although similar processes may operate in human-machine dialogue, the role of design in shaping these models, and their subsequent effects on interaction are not clearly understood. Focusing on synthesis design, we conduct a referential communication experiment to identify the impact of accented speech on lexical choice. In particular, we focus on whether accented speech may encourage the use of lexical alternatives that are relevant to a partner's accent, and how this is may vary when in dialogue with a human or machine. We find that people are more likely to use American English terms when speaking with a US accented partner than an Irish accented partner in both human and machine conditions. This lends support to the proposal that synthesis design can influence partner perception of lexical knowledge, which in turn guide user's lexical choices. We discuss the findings with relation to the nature and dynamics of partner models in human machine dialogue.Comment: In press, accepted at 1st International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI 2019

Asynchronous warming and δ18O evolution of deep Atlantic water masses during the last deglaciation

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here under a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license granted to WHOI. It is made available for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114 (2017): 11075-11080, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1704512114.The large-scale reorganization of deep-ocean circulation in the Atlantic involving changes in North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) and Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) played a critical role in regulating hemispheric and global climate during the last deglaciation. However, changes in the relative contributions of NADW and AABW and their properties are poorly constrained by marine records, including δ18O of benthic foraminiferal calcite (δ18Oc). Here we use an isotope-enabled ocean general circulation model with realistic geometry and forcing conditions to simulate the deglacial water mass and δ18O evolution. Model results suggest that in response to North Atlantic freshwater forcing during the early phase of the last deglaciation, NADW nearly collapses while AABW mildly weakens. Rather than reflecting changes in NADW or AABW properties due to freshwater input as suggested previously, the observed phasing difference of deep δ18Oc likely reflects early warming of the deep northern North Atlantic by ~1.4°C while deep Southern Ocean temperature remains largely unchanged. We propose a thermodynamic mechanism to explain the early warming in the North Atlantic, featuring a strong mid-depth warming and enhanced downward heat flux via vertical mixing. Our results emphasize that the way ocean circulation affects heat, a dynamic tracer, is considerably different than how it affects passive tracers like δ18O, and call for caution when inferring water mass changes from δ18Oc records while assuming uniform changes in deep temperatures.This work is supported by the U.S. NSF P2C2 projects (1401778 and 1401802) and OCE projects (1600080 and 1566432), China NSFC 41630527, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundatio

From Patna to Paris: Providing safe and humane abortion

With access to safe, legal abortion under severe constraint or debate in many parts of the world, less attention has been paid to the issue of quality of abortion care. This issue of Quality/Calidad/Qualité explores two programs that operate in very different settings but with a shared commitment to providing high-quality abortion care in a context of broader reproductive health services: the Clinique d’Orthogénie of Broussais Hospital in France and Parivar Seva Sanstha in India. In both programs, each woman or girl who arrives for abortion receives crucial basic care, including: appropriate medical treatment to ensure complete abortion and safe recovery; if medically appropriate, choice about issues such as anesthesia and/or method of abortion; supportive counseling; and a range of related reproductive health services. The lessons learned from these two programs that emphasize safety, choice, and compassion remind us that there is no reason for an abortion to cause suffering