4 results
FC40: Social health and subsequent cognitive capability: examining the potential mediating roles of depression symptoms and inflammatory biomarker
- Jean Stafford, Serhiy Dekhtyar, Ke Ning, Anna-Karin Welmer, Davide L Vetrano, Giulia Grande, Anna Marseglia, Vanessa G Moulton, Rosie Mansfield, Yiwen Liu, George Ploubidis, Giorgio Di Gessa, Marcus Richards, Daniel Davis, Praveetha Patalay, Jane Maddock
-
- Journal:
- International Psychogeriatrics / Volume 35 / Issue S1 / December 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 February 2024, pp. 102-103
-
- Article
-
- You have access Access
- Export citation
-
Objective:
Social health (SH) markers, including marital status, contact frequency, network size, and social support, have been linked with increased cognitive capability. However, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. We aim to investigate whether depression symptoms and inflammatory biomarkers mediate associations between SH and cognitive outcomes.
Methods:We used data from waves 1-9 of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, involving 7,136 participants aged 50 or older at baseline. First, we examined associations between SH (wave 1) and depression and inflammatory biomarkers (C-reactive protein (CRP) and fibrinogen) (wave 2) using linear regression models. Second, we tested associations between a) SH and b) depression and inflammation with subsequent standardised verbal fluency and memory in wave 3 and change between waves 3-9, indexed using slopes derived from multilevel models. We adjusted for age, sex, socio-economic position, cardiovascular disease, basic and instrumental activities of daily living, health behaviours, and baseline depression symptoms and cognition. We will also conduct causal mediation analysis.
Results:All SH markers, except contact frequency, were associated with lower subsequent depression, but not inflammatory biomarkers. Greater contact frequency (e.g. once-twice a week vs <once per year: β=0.18 [0.01, 0.36]) and less negative support (β=0.02 [0.00, 0.03]) were associated with higher verbal fluency. Larger network size (>6 people vs none: β=0.007SD/year [0.001, 0.012]), less negative (β=0.001SD/year [0.001, 0.002]) and more positive support (β=0.001SD/year [0.000, 0.001]) were linked with slower memory decline, and more positive support predicted slower verbal fluency decline (β=0.001SD/year [0.000, 0.001]). Depression symptoms were associated with lower memory and verbal fluency, and faster memory decline (β=-0.001SD/year [-0.001, -0.000]) and verbal fluency (β=-0.001SD/year [-0.001, -0.000]). CRP was associated with lower verbal fluency (β=-0.02 [-0.04, 0.00]), whereas fibrinogen was linked with faster memory decline (β=-0.001SD/year [-0.003, -0.000]).
Conclusion:Depression symptoms and SH showed associations with subsequent cognitive capability and change. SH was linked with lower depression, but not inflammatory biomarkers. Findings highlight the potential for depression to underpin associations between SH and cognition, a pathway which we will test using causal mediation analysis. We will also examine whether findings replicate in the Swedish National Study of Aging and Care in Kungsholmen.
4 - Maoriland Reservations
- from PART I - 1760–1920
-
- By Jane Stafford, Victoria University
- Edited by Mark Williams, Victoria University of Wellington
-
- Book:
- A History of New Zealand Literature
- Published online:
- 05 April 2016
- Print publication:
- 19 April 2016, pp 56-70
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In the summer of 1907–8, Blanche Baughan went for a walk in the newly established State Reserve in Fiordland. She followed the track that had been cut by Quintin Mackinnon in 1888 from Lake Te Anau, through the bush and over the pass to Milford Sound. Initially fuelled by private enterprise, the various tourist activities of the area – huts, steamers, guiding, and the track itself – had been taken over by the Tourist Department in 1903. Baughan's account of her experience, The Finest Walk in the World, was published in the London Spectator in September 1908, reprinted in a number of local newspapers, enlarged for local publication as ‘an exquisite booklet’, reprinted four times between 1909 and 1926, and included in two collections of her travel writing, Studies in New Zealand Scenery (1916) and Glimpses of New Zealand Scenery (1922).
The work is a distillation of the concerns and ambitions of late colonial New Zealand, ‘Maoriland’ in Australian parlance, a descriptor enthusiastically taken up locally as a way of distinguishing what made New Zealand unique and consequently marketable among other settler societies within the British Empire. Charles Baeyertz's semi-official Guide to New Zealand, ‘authorised by the New Zealand Government’, which went through multiple editions between 1902 and 1912, succinctly identifies these points of difference on his title page: ‘The most wonderful Scenic Country in the World. The home of the Maori. The Angler's and Deerstalker's Paradise’.
The product of this official push to sell the beauties of the landscape to the world, Baughan's ‘booklet’ is oriented towards external approval. Its claim to attention is the sublimity of the landscape – ‘wedding beauty to wonder’, ‘full of a bewildering glory’ – and the challenge to extend the reach of poetic language to measure it adequately:
The Clinton [River]! Gently parting the massed Bush with its open road of radiance, green as moss, glowing as an emerald, pellucid as the air, it glides and gleams along like a living jewel, a creature of crystal – exquisite, unspeakable!
Too insecure to stand alone, much of this language works through simile and contrast – nothing is; it is always like, or better than. To this end, the essay is punctuated by comparisons with the landscapes of other countries.
“Simplicity and art shades reign supreme”: Costume, Collectibles, and Aspiration in Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand
- from Woolf and the Commonwealth
-
- By Jane Stafford, University of Wellington
- Edited by Helen Wussow, Mary Ann Gillies
-
- Book:
- Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2014, pp 78-87
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
On June 19, 1908 in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield—Kathleen Beauchamp as she then was—wrote to her sister Vera. It was a momentous day on which she had received final confirmation that she would be returning to London. Her family were out and her delight quickly shifted to a more essential and fundamental problem she wished to share with her sister—what to wear:
I've nothing fashionable at all—simplicity and art shades reign supreme—A black flop hat with a wide wreath of mauve chrysanthemums round the crown— a little evening frock of satin—soft satin—made exactly after the pattern of Grandmother Dyer's wedding dress—a green straw Home Journal travelling hat with wide black wings—and everything in like manner—Chad & Mother have been yearning, I know to blossom into empire frocks and créations de la moment— but I haven't one—clothes ought to be a joy to the artistic eye—a silent reflex of the soul—so I'm training my amenable little soul accordingly. (Letters I: 49)
Costume and performance are concepts that easily attach to Mansfield's career and to her fictional characters: as Raoul in her 1918 story “Je ne parle pas français” says:
How can one look the part and not be the part? Or be the part and not look it? Isn't looking—being? Or being—looking? (Stories 288)
The display of multiple invented selves that is a hallmark of modernism is a recurrent signature in Mansfield's writing: “True to oneself!” she writes in 1920:
Which self? Which of my many—well, really, that's what it looks like coming to—hundreds of selves. For what with complexes and suppressions, and reactions and vibrations and reflections—there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the willful guests. (Notebooks II: 204)
This stance—seemingly literary and personal—is also connected to, indeed, grows out of the conscious, contrived display of self and style that was a feature of the society she came from: colonial yet urban…
10 - Administering the Literary Empire
- from Part 2 - India and Its Diaspora
-
- By Jane Stafford, Victoria University of Wellington
- Edited by Ralph Crane, English Professor, University of Tasmania, Australia, Anna Johnston, ARC Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in English, University of Tasmania, C. Vijayasree, Was Professor of English, Osmania University
-
- Book:
- Empire Calling
- Published by:
- Foundation Books
- Published online:
- 05 May 2013
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2013, pp 161-175
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In 1876 the London literary critic Edmund Gosse was given what he described as “a thin and sallow packet with a wonderful Indian postmark on it” by William Minto, the editor of the Examiner. It contained, he later recounted, “a most unattractive orange pamphlet of verse, printed at Bhowanipore, … [a] shabby little book of some two hundred pages, without preface or introduction, [which] seemed specially designed by its particular providence to find its way hastily into the waste-paper basket” (Ancient Ballads viii-ix).
The book, A Sheaf Gleaned in Foreign Fields (1876), was a collection of translations into English of French works; its authors were sisters Toru and Aru Dutt, members of a Bengali family already active in the local literary community, though set apart to a certain extent by their conversion to Christianity in 1862. Toru and Aru's mother Kshetramoni published Bengali translations of Christian tracts (tract writing was something she had in common with Gosse's formidable mother Emily). And The Dutt Family Album, a collection of poems by their father Govin Chunder Dutt and his brothers, had been published in London in 1870 with a preface which describes the authors as “foreigners, natives of India, of different ages, and in different walks of life, yet one family, in whom the ties of blood relationship have been drawn closer by the holy bond of Christian brotherhood” (Preface).