The effects of age-stereotyped stimuli on older people’s self-perceptions of age and grip strength

Background: The psychology of ageing has shown that over time, changes in lifestyle and attitudes influence an individual’s ageing experience (Deary et al. 2009). Recent statistics show that over 18% of the UK population are currently considered ‘old’ (Office of National Statistics, 2018), therefore it is becoming a priority that misconceptions and age-stereotypes relating to health and functioning during the ageing process are investigated to explore their possible affects. Objectives: The current thesis has 4 key aims, which are to: (1) Determine whether a natural association exists between functional health (as measured by grip strength) and self-perceptions of age in younger and older adults; (2) Develop a bespoke implicit age-stereotype priming task, which addresses 3 commonly cited limitations of previous literature, and present UK generated age-stereotyped word primes; (3) Investigate (using this improved method) the effects of negative, positive and neutral age-stereotyped word primes on younger and older adults’ grip strength (GS) and self-perceptions of own ageing experience; and (4) Establish whether individual differences leave some older adults more vulnerable to the effects of age-stereotypes. Method: Participants were asked to self-report selfperceptions of age, to perform a simple grasping task to measure grip strength, and to complete an implicit age-stereotype word priming task. Results: Positive selfperceptions of age were positively correlated with higher GS amongst older adults only, independent of increasing older age. Exposure to negative age-stereotyped word primes significantly reduced both GS and self-perceptions of age in the older group only, whilst positive age-stereotyped word primes significantly increased GS. The former effect was significantly stronger than the latter. Mediation analysis confirmed that self-perceptions of age mediate the association between age-stereotyped word primes and GS. The age stereotyped word primes acted as an intervention which either increased or decreased older adults’ self-perceptions of age (depending on the valence of the prime words), which in turn then either improved or weakened GS levels during the grasping task. Results also revealed that individual differences leave some older adults more vulnerable to the effects of age-stereotypes; those with lower self-perceptions of age are more vulnerable to the effects of negative ageing stereotyped word primes (experiencing significantly larger declines in GS), whilst also gaining the least benefit from positive age-stereotyped word primes (experiencing the smallest increase in GS). Cumulative analysis showed that those with lower self-perceptions of age also required exposure to a fewer number of implicit negative age-stereotype word primes to significantly reduce GS in comparison to those with higher self-perceptions of age (i.e., they are also vulnerable to the cumulative effects of negative age-stereotypes). Conversely, when those with lower self-perceptions of age were exposed to positive age-stereotype word primes, not only did they experience smaller improvements to GS, but importantly they also require exposure to more positive implicit age-stereotype word primes to improve GS in comparison to those with higher self-perceptions of age. Discussion: I argue that the findings of this thesis are applicable to and informative for researchers, policy makers, and clinicians when attempting to identify those older adults most at risk of experiencing declines in functional health as a result of vulnerability to the effects of age-stereotypes. The current thesis findings also highlight approaches for early intervention in order to increase functional health through promotion of positive age-stereotypes

The Bianchi groups are subgroup separable on geometrically finite subgroups

We show that for certain arithmetic groups, geometrically finite subgroups are the intersection of finite index subgroups containing them. Examples are the Bianchi groups and the Seifert-Weber dodecahedral space. In particular, for manifolds commensurable with these groups, immersed incompressible surfaces lift to embeddings in a finite sheeted covering.Comment: 19 page

All flat manifolds are cusps of hyperbolic orbifolds

We show that all closed flat n-manifolds are diffeomorphic to a cusp cross-section in a finite volume hyperbolic (n+1)-orbifold.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol2/agt-2-13.abs.htm

Forest Grazing: Managing Your Land for Trees, Forage, and Livestock

This fact sheet gives an overview of the relationships between trees and forage and provides suggestions on managing your land for forest grazing

On the geometric boundaries of hyperbolic 4-manifolds

We provide, for hyperbolic and flat 3-manifolds, obstructions to bounding hyperbolic 4-manifolds, thus resolving in the negative a question of Farrell and Zdravkovska.Comment: 8 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTVol4/paper5.abs.htm

The intercultural dialogue as a method to article an experience between students from Brazil and the United Kingdom

El artículo presenta una experiencia de diálogo intercultural a través de una clase compartida entre estudiantes de profesorado brasileños del pueblo Kaingang y estudiantes de historia del Reino Unido. Está inspirada en la propuesta de la filosofía intercultural que postula al diálogo entre culturas como método para articular un proyecto alternativo al proceso de globalización actual, sustentado en la diversidad de las culturas entendidas como reservas de humanidadcapaces de brindar recursos para una mundialización solidaria, basada en la cooperación entre pueblos y culturas. La construcción de este diálogo requiere de acciones y propuestas concretas que lleven adelante lo meramente enunciado filosóficamente. Creemos que el ámbito educativo, y en especial la educación y la escuela indígena, es un espacio especialmente adecuado para articular el diálogo intercultural de manera práctica y concreta. Por eso además de presentar la experiencia se evalúan cualitativamente sus resultados, mostrando el impacto positivo que tuvo en los dos grupos que participaron en ella

Distant Reading, ‘The Great Unread’, and 19th-Century British Conceptualizations of the Civilizing Mission

Franco Moretti's work on ‘the great unread’ raises serious questions for any field. In the field of new imperial history, I am especially interested in how the use of distant reading to access ‘the great unread’ can inform our study of imperial and colonial discourses. To stimulate research in this direction, I conducted a small-scale case study to explore the methodological considerations of applying distant reading to imperial discourse analysis. I performed a distant reading on a small sample of the British Library’s collection of digitized nineteenth century monographs to trace how understandings of the idea of a ‘civilizing mission’ changed over the century. My findings indicate that a core understanding of the civilizing mission as related to agriculture, education, and peace remained constant throughout the century, while peripheral understandings of the civilizing mission appear to have changed from tangible social values such as commerce and rule of law to intangible values such as honesty and liberty. Based on the methodological choices I made, primarily due to the small scale of this case study, these findings should be approached with caution. However, they illustrate how probing ‘the great unread’ can generate new research questions and provide nuanced contexts of conceptual change in which to locate the study of civilizing discourses