Implications of COVID-19 on the Loneliness of Older Adults in Residential Care Homes

With little understandings on the loneliness of older adults in residential care homes structured by social contact restrictions, the provision of person-centered care was jeopardized during the pandemic. This study employed hermeneutic phenomenology to explore the lived experiences of loneliness of this population during a 5-month period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted unstructured face-to-face interviews with 15 older adults living in seven residential care homes. Thematic analysis was guided by Van Manen’s approach. The essence of loneliness was uncovered as “A deprived sense of self-significance in a familiar world contributes to older adult’s disconnection with prior commitments.” A sub-theme “From collapse to dissolution of self-understanding” revealed how COVID-19 structured their loneliness. Another sub-theme, “Restoring meanings by establishing connections with entities” illustrated the ways to mitigate loneliness during the pandemic. Activities fostering alternative self-interpretation are important to protect older adults against loneliness.

TO THE ISSUE OF ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The article shows the results of a comprehensive study of adolescents in the situation of self-isolation during the Covid 19 pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic as a threat to health and the situation of forced self-isolation, the widespread distance learning have changed the familiar world of a teenager. These changes could provoke a decrease in the level of adolescents’ psychological well-being due to the lack of experience in adapting to such unusual conditions. This problem was the subject of our study. The research sample consisted of 126 teenagers aged 12-14 years. The teenagers are the pupils of secondary schools in Moscow. The research methods included a questionnaire based on the questionnaires ("Understanding the situation of self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic", "The attitude of adolescents to forced distance learning"), the test "Scale of subjective well-being" (G. Perue-Badu) translated by M. V. Sokolova, which were conducted via the Google form in June 2020. According to the questionnaire "Understanding the situation of self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic", adolescents have showed an average level of understanding of the situation of self-isolation: they agree with the need for a self-isolation regime, but have difficulties to comply with it, note difficulties in understanding themselves and interacting with their environment, and have an increased sense of anxiety. The similar data were obtained with respect to the indicator of subjective well-being, and we found out the average level of the signs accompanying the main psycho emotional symptoms, changes in mood and self-assessment of health. The questionnaire "The attitude of adolescents to forced distance learning" showed a contradiction: adolescents are interested in distance learning, but they do not like the increase in the volume of homework. It is worth mentioning that we noted adolescents’ dissatisfaction with the changed process of communication with a teacher and unwillingness to continue school education remotely. According to the results of the study, we can conclude that the level of adolescents’ psychological well-being has changed, since the mentioned factors did not contribute to its improvement. We understand that in the nearest future the psycho prophylactic work with the adolescents should be the priority task of school psychologists.

The Epistemic Problem of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Necessary Information Policy

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted personal, social, and economic lives of millions of people around the world. It has taken the familiar world away from everyone. The pandemic is in large part an epistemic problem caused by the invisible contagious virus. Its invisibility can make people ignorant of the threat and spread of the virus. Government and public need scientists to identify and understand the problem of COVID-19. While the latter do not have complete knowledge to cure the disease, they are more knowledgeable to inform the government how to prevent the pandemic from getting worse. Appropriate government intervention requires a thorough investigation involving frequent and massive data collection, which is too expensive for developing countries. Without sufficient data, any government claim and intervention are questionable. The government can compensate the insufficiency of data by acquiring data and information from other sources, such as civil society organization and the public.

The Global Biosphere and Its Metaphysical Underpinnings: Ecumenical Alternatives in Animism and Astrobiology

The term biosphere designates the “zone of life” on Earth. Outside this sphere, everything becomes “alien.” In this view of things, which I take to be canonical in the modern West, terrestrial life and biosphere overlap more or less neatly. Yet this idea of an almost perfect convergence is not the only view possible. This study presents two anthropological cases which demonstrate, a contrario, that the modern tendency to envisage the biosphere as “our home environment” or as “our familiar world” is in many ways a historical accident. Other ecumenical possibilities (by which I refer to the ancient Greek notion of the “inhabited world,” the oikumene) are by no means unthinkable. Examining the ecumenical originality of two communities that at first sight seem unrelated – Chachi indigenous people in Ecuador and scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial life – will allow us to cast new light on the metaphysical underpinnings of the modern biosphere concept.

Political terror and the right-wing movement (The case of Vladimir Governorate)

The article examines the street confrontation of October 1905 which went down in history as Jewish pogroms. The source base of the work comprises the documents of the police department deposited in the State Archive of Vladimir Oblast and the materials from periodicals of various political leanings. After the publication of the Manifesto of the 17th of October, 1905, in the streets of Russian cities, the revolutionary demonstrations whose participants viewed the Manifesto as a signal for a decisive assault on the autocracy clashed with the patriotic manifestations held by those who wanted to defend their familiar world. The defiant behavior of opposition supporters who preached their political ideals and in doing so insulted national and religious feelings of the conservative strata of population provoked street excesses, which then turned into bloody clashes. The situation was aggravated by the inaction of the local authorities who had not received timely instructions from St Petersburg and showed confusion during the first “days of freedom.” Thus, the pogroms of October 1905 which took place outside the Pale of Settlement were directed not so much against the Jews as against the revolutionaries (a considerable part of them were Jews). Contrary to the idea prevailing in historiography that the clashes of October 1905 were organized, the pogroms arose spontaneously. Neither the government, which was prostrate, nor the right-wing parties, the numerical composition of which in Russia at that time was measured by several thousand people, initiated or organized those events. In October 1905, there were no monarchist organizations in Vladimir Governorate at all. However, the supporters of autocracy are responsible for two political murders which occurred after the pogroms in November–December 1905. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk the crowd infuriated with the events of recent months tore to pieces a revolutionary woman who was transporting weapons, and in the village of Undol workers killed an agitator who called for the overthrow of autocracy. After the foundation of monarchist organizations in Vladimir Governorate, street clashes between the opponents and the supporters of autocracy gradually died down because the monarchists got an opportunity to defend their political convictions in a more civilized form. Although the conflicts between persons of opposite political views continued for some time, they were more like domestic quarrels and had no victims. Both sides were equally responsible for those incidents.

IRRATIONALITY OF THINKING AS A WAY TO COPE WITH THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE MODERN WORLD

This work is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the worldview, in particular, the irrational attitudes of modern people who find themselves in a situation of abrupt changes. Their significance for coping with uncertainty and maintaining a sense of security and control of the world is analyzed. The article considers domestic and foreign approaches to understanding the mechanisms of overcoming and rethinking the changing reality, as well as the contribution of irrational beliefs to strategies aimed at coping with the crisis. The results of an empirical study of the peculiarities of the worldview of people faced with the COVID-19 pandemic and the selfisolation regime introduced in March 2020 are presented. A comparative analysis of the data obtained from 188 respondents was carried out in terms of basic beliefs, belief in the supernatural and conspiracy theory, propensity to pseudo-intentionality, and locus of control. The contributions of gender and age factors to the expression of basic beliefs, irrational attitudes, belief in the supernatural and pseudo-intentionality are shown. The connection of basic beliefs with a tendency to pseudo-intentional attitudes, irrational beliefs and belief in conspiracy theory is demonstrated. The conclusion is made about the predominant importance of maintaining the basic attitudes of the personality when faced with abrupt changes in the familiar world. The limitations of extrapolation of research results due to the specificity of the surveyed sample are noted.

The Flat Earth Society

Chapter 25 explains the construction and use of the astrolabe with reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe. The astrolabe is a rotating map of the heavens constructed using a stereographic projection of the celestial sphere. The projection techniques required to create this map is reminiscent of the projections used by artists to show perspective, and it is closely related to the techniques of cartographers. The most familiar world maps are produced using the Mercator projection devised by Gerardus Mercator in the sixteenth century. Johannes Vermeer included maps in many of his paintings, most notably The Geographer and The Astronomer, and the figure in these painting might be the great microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. The architect Philip Steadman made an in-depth study of whether Vermeer employed a camera obscura when painting.

‘From Your Ever Anxious and Loving Father’: Faith, Fatherhood, and Masculinity in One Man’s Letters to His Son during the First World War

In the early months of 1916, Charles Robb a retired shipping clerk in the East End of London, England, wrote a series of letters to his 19-year-old son Arthur, an army private awaiting embarkation to the Western Front. Charles Robb was my great grandfather and Arthur Robb was my grandfather. The letters offer an intriguing glimpse of one man ‘doing’ fatherhood under conditions of traumatic separation and extreme anxiety. This paper presents an analysis of the letters from a psychosocial perspective, exploring the ways in which the writer exhorts his son to live up to the ideals of Christian manhood, while managing the anxiety of separation by presenting a reconstruction in language of the familiar world of home and church.

Interplay of Fantasy and Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Fantasy and realism are the traits to be found in every culture and individual. Fantasy was often dismissed for being a thing associated with children. This was a practice found to be rampant in the past or it was rather a matter of the past so to say. After centuries of oblivion, people have started giving importance to fantasy when there is a lot of chaos in the society. Fantasy as a genre that helps us to band together, explain, change and form an opinion on reality. Fantasy can surely tempt the human desire, for more than the familiar world of the readers, into ease, anyway from reality and communicate with immense imagination that the readers can connect to. With this in mind, the paper tries to analyze Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children the bizarre and the fantastic blurs the boundaries between the real and plausible in the novel, thereby problematizing the identities of gender, parenthood, and nationality, and renders the readers into a state of uncertainty by incorporating oblique references or links. It also aims to critically analyze and discuss how the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred in literature. The importance of this study is to connect the fine line of fantasy with reality in literature and to present perceptions to the readers on how literature is understood differently by different people.