Life Satisfaction After Spousal Loss: The Potential Influence of Age,Gender, and Leisure

Life satisfaction is considered an important part of successful aging. The purpose of this study was to examine how age, gender, and participation in leisure activities influence the life satisfaction of widowed older adults. Results suggest that age, gender, and changes in physical activity participation are possible predictors of widowed older adults’ life satisfaction. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Creative Change: The Life and Work of Four Novelists: Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth

Robert Kastenbaum has argued that we need to take a life-span approach to the lives of artists in order to determine what factors affected their creativity. To that end, I briefly review the lives of four writers, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth. Each followed a different pattern: Austen wrote productively until her early death; Forster ceased to write novels after his midlife success; Barbara Pym continued to write until her death from cancer; and Henry Roth restarted his moribund career in his seventies. These differences suggest that creativity is closely connected to life events and the artist's psychological state of mind.     

GITAI GO: The Art of Deepening Everyday Life Through Exceeding Codes

The present commentary is focused on exploring holistic ways to approach sense-making processes by following the usage of specific Japanese mimic words, Gitai go, and describing how its functioning cannot be disengaged from an embodied lens to approach language-in-use. In fact, according to Komatsu’s (2010) discussion about the extension of meaning derived from Gitai go and its intrinsic flexible characteristics, it is possible—in terms of semiotics—to inquire into vaguely coded systems of mutual understanding, trying to make sense of the general functioning of signs through their peculiar ambiguity as well as their potential to evoke a vivid negotiation of meaning. This seems to show the openness of meaning highlighted by Gitai go, as it is to be referred to the logic of multiplicity deeply linked with the actors’ feelings in the setting that could in general terms be labeled as the carnal knowledge. Furthermore, it has been arguing about the complexity of daily life experience and its close relation to a concept of “ordinary art”, as the active involvement people show in imagining, changing and creating their personal experience of the world is always performed in their day-by-day frameworks, deeply suggesting a unique strive for appropriating-negotiating-contesting networks of meanings. And this is to be approached as an artistic mode of experiencing, since art too is just embedded in this ever-emerging ambivalence coming from the complex we call “ordinary life” and relating to our deep feelings of facing our futures. Along these lines I suggest that a particular role exists in communicative messages for what is labeled as “redundant” or “superfluous”—since the ambivalence of those messages explicates the dialogical frame of sense-making, in everyday life as a concept of art.     

The Effect of Relative Income Concerns on Life Satisfaction: Relative Deprivation and Loss Aversion

Journal of Happiness Studies - Income comparisons are important for individual well-being. We examine the shape of the relationship between relative income and life satisfaction, and test...     

The Literary Work of Art. Translated with an introduction by George G. Grabowicz,Foreword by David M. Levin.

The introduction of computers into the process of musical composition markedly disturbs the relationships which normally obtain between composer, work, performances, and sound complexes. This shift gives rise to a number of philosophical problems with far-reaching consequences, which this paper discusses. The conclusion is that the use of computers in composition exposes a crisis facing the notion of a work of music, whose outcome cannot yet be foreseen. In its subject matter, the paper takes up issues raised by Roman Ingarden's phenomenological ontology of art works. The use of example and counterexample to probe the boundaries of the notion of a work of music on the other hand owes more to Husserl's method of eidetic variation.