Perspective-Taking, Self-Talk, and Social Connection: A Phenomenological Study of How Individual Practices Reduce Loneliness During the Menopausal Years

Menopause is a stage of the life cycle known for physical, mental, and emotional changes. Many women report feeling isolated and lonely during this time due to changes in hormones and physical appearance, lack of sleep, uncertainty about their role after raising children, and cultural pressures to remain thin and beautiful. Due to the lack of education and normalization of this life change, women often withdraw and become increasingly depressed or anxious, as a result. Loneliness is associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, suicidality, premature death, and a variety of other physical ailments. However, previous research suggests that the practice of solitude, faith, perspective-taking, self-talk, and social connection are effective in reducing these symptoms. In this phenomenological study, women who were identified as being of menopausal age (40-60 years) were interviewed about their experience of loneliness and subsequent coping skills during this life stage. The goal of this study was to learn from the insight and practice of menopausal women in how they coped with loneliness and altered their perspective of being alone. Participants sought relief through the practice of solitude, faith, perspective-taking, self-talk, and social connection. Key factors that enabled women to access these skills had to do with the normalization and validation of their experience, which was needed from partners, peers, medical practitioners, and therapists. This information was then conveyed to medical, spiritual, and mental health practitioners to enhance their assessment and treatment of women presenting with loneliness and other symptoms related to menopause

The Social Information Processing Patterns of Peer-Victimized Children

This study examined social information processing (SIP) in peer-victimized children in ways that considered issues of measurement in what constitutes being a victim. A sample of 107 2nd and 3rd grade students completed self- and peer-reports of victimization and aggression, as well as a measure of SIP. The results indicated that self- and peer- reports of victimization were not significantly correlated. There was a modest but significant positive relationship between victimization and aggression, both within and across informants. Findings about the relationship between victimization and SIP were complicated by overlaps between victimization and aggression, lack of correlations across perspectives, and small sample size. Hostile intent attributions were modestly positively correlated to self-reported victimization, but not to peer-reported victimization. The results suggest that the relationship between victimization and SIP depends on how victimization is measured. Implications of these findings for future research are discussed

Modelling Sonoluminescence

In single-bubble sonoluminescence, a bubble trapped by a sound wave in a flask of liquid is forced to expand and contract; exactly once per cycle, the bubble emits a very sharp ($< 50 ps$) pulse of visible light. This is a robust phenomenon observable to the naked eye, yet the mechanism whereby the light is produced is not well understood. One model that has been proposed is that the light is "vacuum radiation" generated by the coupling of the electromagnetic fields to the surface of the bubble. In this paper, we simulate vacuum radiation by solving Maxwell's equations with an additional term that couples the field to the bubble's motion. We show that, in the static case originally considered by Casimir, we reproduce Casimir's result. In a simple purely time-dependent example, we find that an instability occurs and the pulse of radiation grows exponentially. In the more realistic case of spherically-symmetric bubble motion, we again find exponential growth in the context of a small-radius approximation.Comment: Expanded introduction, appendix on duality, 18 pages, plain Te

Regularity of Neumann solutions to an elliptic free boundary problem

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-58).We examine the regularity properties of solutions to an elliptic free boundary problem, near a Neumann fixed boundary. Consider a nonnegative function u which minimizes the functional ... on a bounded, convex domain ... This function u is harmonic in its positive phase and satisfies ... along the free boundary ... , in a weak sense. We prove various basic properties of such a minimizer near the portion of the boundary ... on which ... weakly. These results include up-to-the boundary gradient estimates on harmonic functions with Neumann boundary conditions on convex domains. The main result is that the minimizer u is Lipschitz continuous. The proof in dimension 2 is by means of conformal mapping as well as a simplified monotonicity formula. In higher dimensions, the proof is via a maximum principle estimate for ...by Sarah Groff Raynor.Ph.D