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Why is language so important to the ways that we make sense of anxiety? This book uses corpus assisted discourse analysis to examine twenty-three million words of text posted to a forum for people with anxiety. It shows how linguistic techniques like catastrophisation and anthropomorphisation can result in very different conceptualisations of anxiety, as well as how aspects of identity like age, sex and cultural background can impact on understandings of anxiety and how it ought to be managed. It tracks the changing identities of posters, from their first posts to their last, and incorporates a range of corpus-based techniques to examine the language data, enabling consideration of interaction between participants and features associated with online forms of communication like emoji. It ultimately provides a step towards a better understanding of different responses to anxiety and aims to promote further engagement with this topic in the field of applied linguistics.
The breadth and spread of corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) indicate its usefulness for exploring language use within a social context. However, its theoretical foundations, limitations, and epistemological implications must be considered so that we can adjust our research designs accordingly. This Element offers a compact guide to which corpus linguistic tools are available and how they can contribute to finding out more about discourse. It will appeal to researchers both new and experienced, within the CADS community and beyond.
The White River Badlands (WRB) of South Dakota record eolian activity spanning the late Pleistocene through the latest Holocene (21 ka to modern), reflecting the effects of the last glacial period and Holocene climate fluctuations (Holocene Thermal Maximum, Medieval Climate Anomaly, and Little Ice Age). The WRB dune fields are important paleoclimate indicators in an area of the Great Plains with few climate proxies. The goal of this study is to use 1 m/pixel-resolution digital elevation models from drone imagery to distinguish Early to Middle Holocene parabolic dunes from Late Holocene parabolic dunes. Results indicate that relative ages of dunes are distinguished by slope and roughness (terrain ruggedness index). Morphological differences are attributed to postdepositional wind erosion, soil formation, and mass wasting. Early to Middle Holocene and Late Holocene paleowind directions, 324°± 13.1° (N = 7) and 323° ± 3.0° (N = 19), respectively, are similar to the modern wind regime. Results suggest significant landscape resilience to wind erosion, which resulted in preservation of a mosaic of Early and Late Holocene parabolic dunes. Quantification of dune characteristics will help refine the chronology of eolian activity in the WRB, provide insight into drought-driven landscape evolution, and integrate WRB eolian activity in a regional paleoenvironmental context.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and obesity are positively associated, with increasing evidence that they share genetic risk factors. Our aim was to examine whether these findings apply to both types of ADHD symptoms for female and male adolescents. We used data from 791 girl and 735 boy twins ages 16−17 years to examine sex-specific phenotypic correlations between the presence of ADHD symptoms and overweight/obese status. For correlations exceeding .20, we then fit bivariate twin models to estimate the genetic and environmental correlations between the presence of ADHD symptoms and overweight/obese status. ADHD symptoms and height/weight were parent- and self-reported, respectively. Phenotypic correlations were .30 (girls) and .08 (boys) for inattention and overweight/obese status and .23 (girls) and .14 (boys) for hyperactivity/impulsivity and overweight/obese status. In girls, both types of ADHD symptoms and overweight/obese status were highly heritable, with unique environmental effects comprising the remaining variance. Furthermore, shared genetic effects explained most of the phenotypic correlations in girls. Results suggest that the positive association of both types of ADHD symptoms with obesity may be stronger in girls than boys. Further, in girls, these associations may stem primarily from shared genetic factors.
Shallow firn cores, in addition to a near-basal ice core, were recovered in 2018 from the Quelccaya ice cap (5470 m a.s.l) in the Cordillera Vilcanota, Peru, and in 2017 from the Nevado Illimani glacier (6350 m a.s.l) in the Cordillera Real, Bolivia. The two sites are ~450 km apart. Despite meltwater percolation resulting from warming, particle-based trace element records (e.g. Fe, Mg, K) in the Quelccaya and Illimani shallow cores retain well-preserved signals. The firn core chronologies, established independently by annual layer counting, show a convincing overlap indicating the two records contain comparable signals and therefore capture similar regional scale climatology. Trace element records at a ~1–4 cm resolution provide past records of anthropogenic emissions, dust sources, volcanic emissions, evaporite salts and marine-sourced air masses. Using novel ultra-high-resolution (120 μm) laser technology, we identify annual layer thicknesses ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 cm in a section of 2000-year-old radiocarbon-dated near-basal ice which compared to the previous annual layer estimates suggests that Quelccaya ice cores drilled to bedrock may be older than previously suggested by depth-age models. With the information collected from this study in combination with past studies, we emphasize the importance of collecting new surface-to-bedrock ice cores from at least the Quelccaya ice cap, in particular, due to its projected disappearance as soon as the 2050s.
This Element explores approaches to locating and examining social identity in corpora with and without the aid of demographic metadata. This is a key concern in corpus-aided studies of language and identity, and this Element sets out to explore the main challenges and affordances associated with either approach and to discern what either approach can (and cannot) show. It describes two case studies which each compare two approaches to social identity variables – sex and age – in a corpus of 14-million words of patient comments about NHS cancer services in England. The first approach utilises demographic tags to group comments according to patients' sex/age while the second involves categorising cases where patients disclose their sex/age in their comments. This Element compares the findings from either approach, with the approaches themselves being critically discussed in terms of their implications for corpus-aided studies of language and identity.
This study examines whether memory intervention programs can mitigate health care costs. Research suggests these programs translate to a decreased intention of older adults who are worried about age-normal memory changes to seek traditional outlets for medical/psychiatric help. We employed a cost-benefit analysis approach to analyze the effectiveness of a memory intervention program within Ontario. We leveraged estimates of decreased intentionality to seek physician care following a community-based memory intervention with physician billing profiles to calculate the potential cost savings to the province’s health care system. The intervention studied was found to reduce provincial health care spending by $6,094 per program group. This amount exceeds $121.25 in direct costs per attendee associated with administering five program sessions. This analysis justifies further research on how community-based memory and aging programs can offer low-cost solutions to help individuals cope with subjective memory complaints and assist the health care system in prioritizing care for aging patients.
Youth in the juvenile justice system evince high rates of mental health symptoms, including anxiety and depression. How these symptom profiles change after first contact with the justice system and – importantly – how they are related to re-offending remains unclear. Here, we use latent growth curve modeling to characterize univariate and multivariate growth of anxiety, depression, and re-offending in 1216 male adolescents over 5 years following their first arrest. Overall, the group showed significant linear and quadratic growth in internalizing symptoms and offending behaviors over time such that levels decreased initially after first arrest followed by a small but significant upturn occurring a few years later. Crucially, multivariate growth models revealed strong positive relationships between the rates of growth in internalizing symptoms and offending behaviors such that improvements in mental health related to greater decreases in offending, and vice versa. These results highlight the reciprocal nature of internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescence, underscoring the importance of considering mental health alongside offending in the juvenile justice system.
This introductory chapter lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the rest of the monograph. It begins by introducing the topic of obesity and by reviewing existing (linguistic) research on it. It then introduces the context of the UK news media in detail. Finally, the chapter introduces the corpus of obesity newspaper articles assembled for this study and the methodological approach we use to analyse this data, which combines corpus linguistics with critical discourse studies.
Having explored the representation of obesity in the press from a range of methodological and thematic perspectives in the previous chapters, this final analytical chapter focuses on how such representations are received by readers. This chapter describes the construction and analysis of the reader comments accompanying a sample of articles about obesity published on the most-visited online newspaper in the UK – the MailOnline. By comparing these comments to their corresponding articles, the analysis demonstrates how the readers’ comments tend, in the main, to go further than the articles in the extent to which they stigmatise and shame people with obesity, thereby offering more negative and extreme takes on the obesity-related stories being reported. Yet, at the same time, the analysis also shows the ways in which readers can challenge the original articles and, indeed, other commenters, through comments which offer counter discourses to the dominant shaming ones.
This chapter examines the use of language and discourse that shames and stigmatises people with obesity and, conversely, that which could be viewed as reclaiming the concept, such as through fat acceptance and body positivity. In particular, the analysis focuses on how people with obesity are named, the characteristics that are attributed to them and the actions that they are represented as performing. This chapter also explores a theme that sits slightly outside of these foci but which emerged during the analysis; that of the ‘obese criminal’.
This chapter commences our analysis by using the keywords approach to explore uses of language (and, by extension, representations) that are characteristic of all sections of the British press when reporting on the topic of obesity. We divide our corpus into four sections according to newspapers’ format and political leaning. These four sections are left-leaning broadsheets, left-leaning tabloids, right-leaning broadsheets and right-leaning tabloids. The analysis in this chapter focuses on words that were key across all these sections (i.e. ‘shared’ keywords) and so provide an inductive ‘way in’ for exploring representations of obesity that are pervasive across the press.
This chapter concludes the monograph by summarising its main findings. The chapter aims to explain the dominance of certain patterns as well as the relative minority status of others. This chapter also offers methodological reflections on the study and asks how representations which challenge the types of stigmatising and shaming discourses observed might be challenged in future.
This chapter explores how representations of obesity intersect with discourses relating to other aspects of identity, focusing in particular on gender. The analysis is divided into two halves. The first half of the chapter examines the representation of men and women with obesity using collocation and compares the representations against each other, relating these to wider gendered discourses in society. The second half analyses a particular type of article where a focus on gender is foregrounded – weight loss narratives. Specifically, this part of the analysis compares the ways in which men’s and women’s weight loss is reported in the press. Overall the analysis reported in this chapter points to the ways in which representations of obesity can depend on the gender and sex identity of the person or group in question. While men’s obesity is represented as exceptional and their weight loss methods as unusual or extreme, obesity in women is depicted as something that is more widespread but also more harmful, including to their children and other relatives.