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The disruptions to everyday life wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic include distortions in the experience of time, as reported widely by ordinary citizens and observed by journalists and social scientists. But how does this temporal disruption play out in different time scales-in the individual day as opposed to the medium- and long-term futures? And how might place influence how individuals experience and understand the pandemic's temporal transformations? This essay examines a range of temporal disruptions reported in day diaries and surveys submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown project, an online archive that has been documenting ordinary life in Muncie, Indiana, USA since 2016. Viewing these materials as instances of life writing, the essay probes the interactions between temporal disruptions and the local setting as they inflect the autobiographical selves our writers construct in their pandemic writings. It shows how living in Muncie-a postindustrial city with its particular combination of historical, demographic, economic, social, and political dynamics-structures the autobiographical stories available to our writers, and how the disruption of time produces new variations and problems for life writing. In the midst of a global crisis, we glimpse the pandemic's reshaping of a local structure of feeling in which a pervasive, local narrative of civic decline frames individual self-fashioning., Competing Interests: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

Purpose: Aggression, or an action that intend to harm, encompasses different forms with varying intensity, impact, and salient features. Globally and in Indian context specifically, aggression against women is often normalized if there is no physical aggression involved as the hurt caused tends to be invisible. The current study explored the perceived intensity of physical, verbal, and sexual aggression among south Indian adults., Method: Aggressive instances from the life writings of two south Indian women were chosen and were rated by five independent coders to check inter-coder reliability. The select narratives disclose instances of domestic aggression. Ten instances with highest ratings were chosen as the material for data collection. Adults ( N = 145) from two southern states had reported the perceived intensity of aggression in each context. Textual analysis and ANOVA were the analytic techniques adopted., Results: The results indicate trivialization of verbal aggression compared to physical and sexual aggression. Further, the instances of verbal or more subtle aggression were perceived as even more trivial when the respondents got exposed to the instances of explicit physical and sexual aggressions first., Conclusions: The findings indicate trivialization of verbal and implicit forms of aggression, particularly when exposed along with physical and explicit forms of aggression. Consequences of different forms of aggression were not considered significant by the respondents. Suggestions for further studies, changes in policy-making, and law-enforcement were made based on the current results., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Arya and George.)

This paper explores the concept of the double standard of ageing as applied to women's experience and perceptions of mid-life sexuality and love affairs. Drawing on a selection of popular and literary women's writing, it argues that the recurring trope or motif of the 'last chance' affair is an ideological vehicle that serves to age women by dividing their lives in two - pre and post-sexual, youthful and middle-aged - with all the associations of a decline in status and value that have, moreover, much broader implications for gendered equality. There is also a submerged theme of empowerment running through these women's stories, through which, among other things, it is possible to critique normative sexuality, which enshrines male privilege, at earlier points in the life course. However, the continued salience of the double standard suggests both the presence of a powerful tributary feeding ongoing gender inequality and the role that age plays in this., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

A large body of experimental evidence in the empirical sciences shows that writing about life experiences can be beneficial for mental and physical health. While empirical data regarding the health benefits of writing interventions have been collected in numerous studies in psychology and biomedicine, this literature has remained almost entirely disconnected from scholarship in the humanities and cognitive neuropsychology. In this paper, I review the literature from psychological and biomedical writing interventions, connect these findings to views from philosophy, cognitive neuropsychology and narratology and argue that examining established regularities in how narratives are structured can shed further light on the psychological processes engaged during writing interventions. In particular, I argue that the narratological concept of conflict can be applied to resolve patterns of seemingly conflicting empirical findings in psychological studies. More generally, I propose that an interdisciplinary perspective can provide a broader theoretical basis for understanding the psychological processes underlying the health benefits of autobiographical writing and provide directions for future research in psychology and biomedicine., (© 2020. The Author(s).)

We argue that historical femme life writing forms a rich resource for femme theory that contributes to, challenges, and extends contemporary academic femme literature. We focus on the experiences of femmes during the second-wave feminist movement, specifically within the context of 1970s and 1980s U.S. lesbian feminism. The texts we examine include My Dangerous Desires by Amber Hollibaugh (2000), A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle (1987), Minnie Bruce Pratt's (1995) S/he , and selections from The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Nestle (1992). Informed by Clare Hemmings' (2011) and Victoria Hesford's (2013) critiques that past feminisms are often retold using reductive narratives, we (re)read this femme life writing to foreground the ways in which femmes have historically troubled and resisted monolithic accounts of lesbian feminism, lesbian identities, femininity, and sexuality. By centering queer feminine voices from this period to highlight major themes of this life writing, and drawing on Andi Schwartz's (2018) positioning of femme cultural production as a basis for theory, we argue that earlier iterations of queer femininities are relevant to and important for contemporary femme theory. Ultimately, we analyze what historical femme life writing reveals about the place of femininity within the lesbian and feminist communities of their time, how these dynamics inform current perceptions of queer and femme politics, and how femmes resist their cultural and critical marginalization.

Since the 1990s, Black British poets have been at the forefront of developing the "one-person poetry show" or spoken-word play, an apt format for negotiating diasporic history and cultural memory in a public arena. The focus of this article is Kat François's one-woman show Raising Lazarus (2009/2016), which stages the poet's own quest for information about her Grenadian relative Lazarus François, a World War I soldier. A media-specific analysis explores how François's text is semantically enriched when translated into a live performance. The authenticity effect typically produced in spoken-word poetry through the unity of author and performer is compounded in Raising Lazarus by textual and paratextual keys that frame François's show as embodied auto/biography. Merging life writing, monodrama, and spoken-word poetry, Raising Lazarus reveals the one-person show to be an effective and popular medium for Black British poets to articulate personal experience and negotiate collective identities through performance., Competing Interests: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author., (© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.)

We articulate the lifespan theory of change by which an attachment-focused integrative reminiscence intervention, "Life Writing", is expected to interrupt the continuing problem of insecure attachment in adults and reverse associated reduced health and well-being outcomes. Based on preliminary studies and previous research, Life Writing is expected to foster earned-secure attachment in adults who work through subjective memories of unresolved attachment trauma. Roughly two decades of research on integrative reminiscence interventions like Life Writing show their consistent and wide-ranging positive impact. However, the bulk of this research demonstrates that such programs work, without also clarifying how they work, leaving unanswered questions as to how change occurs and how benefits might continue to accrue to participants through the lifespan. This represents what are known as "black box" effects. A program and evaluation planning tool, The Netway, was used to 1) identify hypothesized links between program inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and long-term impacts; 2) to clarify the underlying assumptions related to the program's success; and 3) to consider the appropriate contexts for the program. The logic model presented here articulates the hypothesized causal pathway from insecure to earned-secure attachment, in preparation for rigorous empirical tests of the program's lifespan theory of change., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The cardiac impact of psychological stress historically and socially understood as boundary experiences of human life has long since become an icon. From the aching heart to the sudden death provoked by awe, horror, grief, anger, and humiliation on one side and extreme enchantment, enthusiasm, and excitement on the other, the broken heart has become a globally recognized and powerful metaphor present from folklore to popular culture to high literature and back to everyday communication. In medicine, the "broken heart syndrome" is described as a relatively new nosological entity that has been used synonymously with the term tako-tsubo or stress cardiomyopathy. Among those three terms, however, the broken heart most vividly draws the connection between conditions under which lived experience triggers cardiac damage and conversely, cardiovascular death occurs. According to Hassan and Yamasaki (2013) [1] and quite apart from the general perception medical notions of the broken heart indeed go back to at least 1967, when Rees and Lutkins studied the death rate among 903 relatives of patients who died in Wales. They found that 4.8% of bereaved close relatives died within a year of bereavement compared with 0.68% of a non-bereaved control group. Among widows and widowers, the mortality rate was even 10 times greater than that of the matched controls. After the first year of bereavement, however, mortality rates of relatives of a deceased person did not differ significantly from the control group Rees and Lutkins (1967) [2]. Similar findings were published by Parkes et al. (1969) [3] following up on 4486 widowers at the age of 55 for 9years following the death of their wives in 1957. During the first six months after the spouse had died, the mortality rate of the widowers was 40% above the rate of married men of the same age. While it seems plausible to accept the etiological role and pathogenic impact of personal loss, the pathogenic processes causing death remained relatively blurred. We will explain, why inaccurately stressing the fact that the broken heart and/or tako-tsubo syndrome would be a relatively new way of looking at stress-related cardiomyopathy as outlined by Yoshikawa (2015) [4] and why attaching stress-related cardiomyopathy to culturally powerful yet value-laden metaphors, might obstruct pathways to a better understanding, prevention and clinical management of the disease. By looking at narrative understandings and clinical representations of the broken heart, we aim to highlight the need for a more contextualised view of the broken heart syndrome in order to facilitate multi- and transdisciplinary approaches aiming at its prediction, prevention, and treatment., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This essay considers the ways in which graphic caregiving memoirs complicate the idealizing tendencies of ethics of care philosophy. The medium's "capacious" layering of words, images, temporalities, and perspectives produces "productive tensions. . . The words and images entwine, but never synthesize" (Chute 2010, 5). In graphic memoirs about care, this "capaciousness" allows for quick oscillation between the rewards and struggles of care work, representing ambiguous, even ambivalent attitudes toward care. Graphic memoirs effectively represent multiple perspectives without synthesis, part of a structural and thematic ambivalence that provides a provocative counterpart to the abstract idealism of ethics of care philosophy.