Possession states are a complex phenomenon that takes a variety of different cultural and religious forms, which may or may not be associated with a psychiatric diagnosis. A case study demonstrates how demonic attributions may be employed as a form of negative religious coping and may lead to spiritual struggles. It illustrates the importance of understanding theological/religious context of belief in spirit possession and the difficulties of reaching a psychiatric diagnosis when the patient belongs to a faith community that understands such experiences as spiritually determined and not symptomatic of illness. Possession states are considered unusual in the UK and yet they are very common worldwide. Exorcism (or disobsession or spirit release) has in some contexts been proposed as an appropriate (if controversial) psychiatric treatment. While, in appropriate religious/cultural contexts, it can be helpful, there is also evidence that it can be harmful when applied in the wrong way to patients with certain diagnoses. This raises important questions about collaboration with faith leaders, safeguarding those who are vulnerable and not pathologising culturally normative practices.

In this reflective afterword, Shinobu Kitayama traces how our understanding of culture and emotion has shifted from viewing emotions as biologically hard-wired to understanding them as dynamically shaped by culture. It articulates four themes as emerging from the edited volume The Cultural Shaping of Emotion: emotion as situated cultural practice, the centrality of meaning-making, emotion development as cultural apprenticeship, and the dynamic interplay between biology and culture. In sketching pathways for the future, Kitayama calls for an integrative approach that studies emotions as rooted in cultural meanings and practices as well as in biological processes. He also calls to study emotions beyond East–West dichotomies such that we can move toward a globally informed and inclusive science of emotion.

Chapter 2 turns to the evidence of royal diplomas produced by the kings of Mercia and Wessex during the reigns of Æthelwulf, Berhtwulf and Burgred. With Æthelwulf’s diplomas, we find the earliest clear evidence for centralised production of diplomas for an Anglo-Saxon king. It is in this centralised West Saxon context, furthermore, that Old English boundary clauses are likely to have been established as a royal diplomatic feature. Contemporary Mercian diplomas lack evidence for comparable production processes. Novelty nevertheless is apparent: with a royal diploma in Old English, and in the literary flair of diplomas issued for the community at Breedon-on-the-Hill. Overall, the continued importance of the Latin charter tradition for both Mercian and West Saxon kings is clear, yet there was space for experimentation, innovation and reflection on the qualities and potencies that specific languages could carry. Moreover, people were increasingly interested in the performative potential of charter production, as an opportunity for ritual action that would generate and reaffirm authority for participants.

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a psychiatric condition marked by severe symptoms in the premenstrual phase, including affective, cognitive and physical changes. It is triggered by fluctuations in allopregnanolone, a metabolite of progesterone that acts as a GABA-A receptor modulator. Diagnosis relies on prospective symptom tracking across menstrual cycles. Although suicidality is not part of the diagnostic criteria, an association with PMDD has been observed. The evidence base for managing premenstrual disorders includes lifestyle changes, certain supplements, cognitive behavioural therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, combined hormonal contraception and gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues. Surgical removal of the ovaries may benefit individuals with severe, treatment-resistant PMDD. Evidence around premenstrual exacerbation or cyclical changes in other mental disorders remains sparse. However, encouraging individuals to track their cycles and identify symptom patterns can support personalised care planning. Menstruation per se can be a challenge to certain populations and disentangling this from psychological response to hormonal changes is key.

After finishing Sons and Lovers Lawrence wrote a ‘Foreword’ in which he tried, in an elusive, oracular mode, to clarify, for his own and Edward Garnett’s benefit, the broader cultural, almost cosmological directions that he understood the novel to have pinpointed. This document initiated a series of remarkable philosophical excursuses on Lawrence’s part in the 1910s responding at first to Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche, and, after mid-1914, the Italian Futurists. In these essays the cosmological would be wrestled into commerce with the everyday. The space thereby opened up for fiction gave Lawrence the opportunity to render the inner movements of deep and unacknowledged urges rather than externally dramatising them in the clear air of realism. His stories of mid-1913, ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, as well as earlier ones revised in mid-1914 for the Prussian Officer collection, demonstrate the development. A performative habit of pushing emotions and states of being to clarifying end-points emerged, nowhere more compellingly than in the revised versions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and ‘Daughters of the Vicar’.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: we first give a full description of those weights β = (βn)n≥0 such that the composition operators Cϕ are bounded on the weighted Hardy space H2(β) for all symbols ϕ (analytic self-maps of D).

Chapter 3 centres on case selection and methodological considerations. The discussion opens up with a brief analysis that details how the MENA is understudied from both a climate and gender representation perspective, before moving on to a discussion of why it is important to study representation and climate change in authoritarian settings, i.e., not only in the MENA, but broadly speaking. The discussion in the first part of the chapter also covers the status of the MENA as a so-called ‘climate change hot-spot’. A considerable section of the case selection rationale in chapter 3 is dedicated to the study of gender and climate change within the MENA, which illustrates how the MENA case aligns with studies elsewhere in the Global South, i.e., focusing on women at the micro level and their vulnerability. The final (second) part of the chapter goes into detail with the methodology after briefly outlining the approaches favoured in the extant academic literature, coving both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Culture and emotion are two of the fundamental mechanisms for human adaptation to the natural and social environment. Culture provides informational resources that help a human population adapt to environmental regularities, whereas emotion provides informational resources that help adaptation to environmental perturbations. In this chapter, we speculate on micro-to-macro cultural dynamics under societal threats, namely, when a population experiences recurrent large-scale perturbations. We first piece together individual-level micro-cultural dynamics under societal threat – encoding, storage, and transmission of cultural information when a large proportion of a population is threatened with potential adverse effects by natural challenges, such as extreme weather events and pandemics, or by social challenges, such as wars and conflicts. We then speculate how these processes may give rise to macro-level cultural dynamics under recurrent societal threats by transforming cultural scripts to cope with societal challenges.

At present, signed graphs with a small number of distinct eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix remain largely undetermined, even in the case of just two eigenvalues. This chapter presents the current state of knowledge, focusing on signed graphs that possess at most four eigenvalues. Detailed constructions are provided, along with an in-depth analysis of the interplay between spectral properties and graph structure. Complete characterizations are given for particular signed graphs with two eigenvalues, including various classes such as signed line graphs. In addition, it is shown that the signed line graph of a regular signed doubled graph possesses exactly two eigenvalues. The discussion is further extended to regular signed graphs with three or four eigenvalues, as well as signed graphs with a small number of net Laplacian eigenvalues, highlighting both theoretical results and illustrative examples.