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Oral health and well-being among older adults

When we think about well-being among older adults, how often do we think about their oral health as being an important component? In reviews of risk factors for low well-being among older adults, oral health is never explicitly mentioned, although other health conditions and disease states are often discussed. This is despite untreated caries (dental decay) being the most prevalent of all health conditions in global burden of disease estimates.

General health and functioning are important components of well-being, especially among older adults. Even though oral health is an integral part of general health, it is often neglected in gerontological research. For example, in all the research papers published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A and B, the term ‘oral health’ is mentioned in the titles only five times.

Even when well-being research takes disability among older adults into account, common measures of disability such as limiting health problems or Activities of Daily Living (ADL) do not explicitly refer to disabling conditions related to oral health. For example, one of the ADL questions is about problems people have with cutting their food. This is different from a common problem that most older adults face which are problems with chewing food due to missing teeth. Another common oral health problem among older adults is the pain and discomfort associated with ill-fitting dentures, which can also decrease well-being.

In previous research, a paradoxical association between older age and better oral health related quality of life has been found, even though older adults are more likely to be edentate (no natural teeth). Historically, tooth loss was considered a normal part of the ageing process. However, expectations have changed and most people now assume that they will maintain most of their teeth over their lifetime, and take active measures to do so.

Becoming edentate can have a negative impact on a person’s social life and daily activities. For example, people who are edentate may avoid participation in social activities because they are embarrassed to speak, smile, or eat in the company of other people. Difficulty eating, avoiding smiling, and difficulty cleaning teeth are the daily life functions most commonly affected by oral conditions. Becoming edentate could have an immediate impact on a person’s mood and subjective well-being. Tooth loss is a traumatic experience and a serious disabling life event resulting in feelings of bereavement, lowered self-confidence, and altered social behaviours.

Although oral health is not the most important factor for subjective well-being among older adults, our research suggests that it is an independent risk factor for changes in well-being among a national sample of older adults living in England. We found that a worsening in oral health-related quality of life was associated with a decrease in subjective well-being, even after taking into account changes in disability and other potential health and socioeconomic/demographic confounding factors.

Becoming edentate or experiencing a deterioration in oral health leading to an impact on your daily functioning are important risk factors for well-being and depression among older adults. Researchers in gerontology should consider the impact of poor oral health among older adults on their quality of life and well-being. For practitioners and geriatric clinicians, our study emphasises the importance of maintaining good oral health in later life, as this can have consequences on the wider social life of older adults that goes beyond their oral health.

Oral health and general health are inextricably linked and should not be treated as separate entities. The late Professor Aubrey Sheiham emphasised “The compartmentalization involved in viewing the mouth separately from the rest of the body must cease because oral health affects general health by causing considerable pain and suffering and by changing what people eat, their speech and their quality of life and well-being.”

Featured image credit: Green apple by stevepb. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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Implicit bias in the age of Trump

The leading Republican Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has called Mexicans “rapists” and advocates a policy of banning all Muslims from entering the United States. His closest rival, Ted Cruz, agrees with the ban on Muslims and wants to see if he can make the sand of the Middle East glow. Black protestors are being beaten at Trump rallies, with Trump’s explicit encouragement.

By any common definition, Trump’s statements and policies are racist. Yet we are researchers on implicit bias—largely unconscious, mostly automatic social biases that can affect people’s behavior even when they intend to treat others fairly regardless of their social group identity. Our concern with implicit bias might seem like a relic of a bygone, pre-Trump era, in which explicit bigotry was on the wane, at least in mainstream political speech.   Does implicit bias have anything to add to our understanding of our current political moment?

Our answer, you won’t be surprised to hear, is yes.

It is too soon to be confident in any one theory of the cause of Trump’s popularity. But it certainly seems that his sexist and racist statements are popular with his supporters. Many descriptions of his campaign events (see, for instance, here and here) have noted the bigoted applause lines, the derogatory signs, the near lynch mob mentality directed toward black protestors. It seems that Trump has returned the implicit to the explicit, and has benefitted (so far) for it. This fits with studies suggesting that Obama’s presidency may have sparked a rise in the influence of “old-fashioned racism” (such as opposition to interracial dating) on political preferences. It also fits with recent work (although we note that this study has not been peer reviewed) showing a strong tendency for Trump supporters to characterize Muslims as violent.

At the same time, Trump’s support reaches beyond this. His advocates are surprisingly diverse (but note that his supporters are not nearly as diverse as those of any of the leading Democratic candidates), and most are not white supremacists. Several authors (for example, here and here) have argued persuasively that a significant portion of Trump’s popularity stems from a mix of his economic populism, outsider status, mercantilism, and ability to puncture the stage-managed nature of recent American politics.

There is a debate right now about which of these factors better explains the Trump phenomenon. Is his appeal mostly due to his willingness to speak the bigoted beliefs that many of his supporters hold? Or is his appeal rather due to his outsider status, his promise to change what many believe to be a broken political system?

Our answer is that both of these interpretations are likely to be right. And understanding the relationship between implicit and explicit bias can help us to see why.

Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Some of Trump’s support certainly seems to be due to his explicit bigotry. According to Public Policy Polling, 70% of Trump supporters in South Carolina believe the confederate flag should be flying over the State Capital; 38% wish the South had won the Civil War; 80% support a ban on Muslims entering the United States and 44% think the practice of Islam should be altogether outlawed; and 31% say they would support a ban on homosexuals entering the United States. These statistics may reflect the beliefs of Trump’s South Carolinian supporters in particular, whom we hasten to note are themselves only a portion of Republican primary election voters. Nonetheless, these are terrifying statistics.

But the extent to which Trump’s support is due to factors other than explicit bigotry is NOT the extent to which social biases are irrelevant to his appeal. Trump’s economic populism, for example, which largely focuses on the “good old days” of the 1950s American blue collar economy, is arguably a conduit for activating the kinds of implicit stereotypes that have been found in studies of hiring, promotions, and so on. For, of course, the 1950s are only the “good old days” for some Americans. This nostalgia is also likely to implicate implicit associations between “American” and “white.” The idea that social biases help to explain the support Trump receives for those statements and beliefs of his which aren’t explicitly bigoted is consistent with John McConahay’s “Modern Racism Theory.” The core claim of this theory is that racist beliefs are often channeled into more socially acceptable positions on public policy.   Indeed, there are already some indications that Trump is tapping into implicit attitudes about Muslims, which are more negative than explicit ones (again, not yet peer-reviewed). As one of us has written elsewhere, Trump carefully combines his explicitly racist statements (let’s ban Muslims) with figleaves (just until we figure out what’s going on) that provide just enough cover to reassure at least some voters that he isn’t really racist.

(We note a possible upshot for future research on implicit bias emerging from the Trump phenomenon. Researchers are increasingly recognizing that implicit biases may not be all that unconscious. For example, one recent study found that people are surprisingly good at predicting their own implicit attitudes. The case of Trump supporters might add to this general point. Perhaps more people than researchers previously thought fail to report their implicit biases not because they’re unaware of them, but because, until now, it has been socially unacceptable for them to do so. Thanks to Alex Madva for this suggestion.)

A further, vitally important factor, lies in the structural elements of economic inequality: informal segregation of employment, schooling, and housing, incarceration practices, police profiling, and so on. Our view is that this is deeply intertwined with implicit bias. One principal way in which individuals’ minds become biased is by having relatively closed and homogenous experiences with representatives from other social groups, for example, by living in a segregated neighborhood. And arguably one reason why people often support housing policies that promote segregated neighborhoods, for example, is because they have implicitly biased minds. They might, for example, associate whiteness with safety. Moreover, the implicit nature of such stereotypes enables people to see themselves as conforming with mainstream racial norms; they are not racists, they just want safe neighborhoods. In this way, social-structural causes of inequality and implicit bias are mutually supporting.

We suspect something similar is occurring in the case of Trump’s non-explicitly racist supporters. Many of them live in segregated neighborhoods and attended segregated schools. They are exposed to the products of implicitly biased media decisions about whom to feature in stories on welfare, immigration, violent crime, and terrorism. All of these social-structural phenomena inform their implicit attitudes. This may allow people who genuinely disavow racism to think that “he doesn’t really mean it” when Trump demonizes huge segments of humanity as dangerous, lazy, worthless, and weak. This also appears to be a classic effect of cognitive dissonance due to implicit bias.   People may think, consciously or unconsciously, “I’m not a racist, but I like what Trump’s saying, so he must not really mean the racist parts of what he says.”

Trump’s explicit racism is shocking.  His campaign’s legitimization of explicitly bigoted rhetoric in the public sphere is also shocking.  But to fully make sense of his campaign’s appeal, especially to those who are not explicit racists, we must think not just about the explicit but also the implicit. And this is why research on implicit bias remains important for making sense of the Trump phenomenon.

Featured image: Trump Tower, Chicago IL by Danny Huizinga. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Show me the bodies: A monumental public policy failure

In the 21st century, “show-me-the-bodies” seems a cruel and outdated foundation for public policy. Yet history is littered with examples—like tobacco and asbestos—where only after the death toll mounts is the price of inaction finally understood to exceed that of action. In 19th century England, women factory inspectorate workers’ warnings about crippling lung disease in teenagers working with asbestos were ignored until evidence of the epidemic toll of factory work became overwhelming more than a half century later. Modern parallels are very much with us. Lung cancer in a young Chinese girl who grew up in a polluted urban environment and breast cancer in a 21-year-old young woman who kept her cell phone in her bras are stunning indications of modern hazards where we cannot afford to wait for broader public impacts before reining in exposures.

In 1996, analyses I conducted with the World Health Organization showed that seven out of the world’s ten most polluted cities were in China, where citizens were breathing dangerously polluted air. In 2013, a small girl in one industrialized zone bore the price of growing up breathing the equivalent of two packs of cigarette smoke a day. The Chinese government reported an extraordinary event – an eight-year-old living next to a heavily trafficked road developed lung cancer.

Polluted air has hit China big and hard. Rates of lung cancer have grown fourfold in the past decade. Stifling hazy air pollution in China has shut down airports and tanker traffic. It is not unusual for levels of dangerous ultra-fine particles of PM2.5 to reach 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter – 40 times the World Health Organization’s advised level.

The “show-me-the-bodies” approach that China has taken with respect to both tobacco smoking and air pollution is proving both costly and painful. The country faces a public health catastrophe of growing increasing rates of lung cancer in its young. Tourism to the heavily polluted capital city, Beijing, is plummeting. American embassy personnel receive hardship pay for being stationed in Beijing. In order to maintain fitness, those who can afford to do so use electric treadmills in offices where air filtration machines clean the air. They also drive cars with special air filters, knowing that pollution inside vehicles stuck in traffic can be four to eight times higher than the surrounding air: 4000-8000 micrograms per cubic meter. The irony of this situation is clear. People are using even more energy in order to clean up the dirty air they’ve created by driving and producing electricity from burning coal.

The situation now posed by cellphones and wireless transmitting devices around the world appears eerily reminiscent of what has transpired with tobacco, asbestos, and air pollution. A brave young 21-year-old woman from eastern Pennsylvania, Tiffany Frantz has come forward with the story of her own rare cancerous breast tumors that formed right under the antennae of the cellphone she kept in her bra. Normally, breast cancer occurs in older women or younger ones with a family history of the disease. Tiffany is neither. More cases are being reported, including that of Chinese-American runner Donna Jaynes, (who is naturally in a very low risk category for the disease). Physicians like Lisa Bailey, breast surgeon and former chief of the American Cancer Society for California, are deeply concerned. “Young women should not get breast cancer and certainly do not develop several distinctive tumors in the center of the chest,” she noted. “This is a wake-up call to keep phones off the body.”

Recent studies find that those who begin using cell phones as teens have four to eight times more risk of brain cancer as young adults. The Cleveland Clinic reports that men who keep phones in their pockets may have lower sperm motility and viability. Yale University studies show that mice exposed prenatally to cellphone radiation develop damaged brains and behavioral problems. Yet, these studies showing that operating phones can damage the body, as well as case reports on Tiffany and others like her are strangely omitted from reviews on wireless radiation, such as that recently carried out by Canada’s Safety Code Six, or from the increasingly challenged International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.

Overdue are apologies from major telecom manufacturers and Internet providers to people like Tiffany. They continue to market cell phones and other microwave-radiating products especially to infants, toddlers, and young teens and fail to provide clear notice that such radiation increases the risks of brain cancers, reproductive harm, and a host of other health problems.

In fact, buried within most smart phones are warnings that the FCC’s thermally-based exposure levels can exceed tested levels if the device is kept in the pocket or bra (which is why Consumer Reports recently advised people not to keep phones in their pocket). For tablets, the situation is even more worrisome – they can have up to four microwave radiating antenna. Tablets are generally tested to avoid heating an adult male body when kept at a distance of about eight inches. Developers never dreamed that millions of young children – including a third of all infants – would hold these devices close to developing brains and bodies. Despite advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics to avoid screen time before age two, babies are learning to swipe tablets before they can talk or walk.

We need software and hardware to limit direct microwave radiation into the brain and body. We need clear information on ways to reduce exposures—keeping tablets on tables, not laps, downloading at a distance and then using them on airplane mode, and preferring wired over wireless connections.

Tiffany Frantz and Donna Jayne are sending us all a wake-up call. Let’s hope we hear it soon. The “show-me-the-bodies” approach cannot work for a generation using a rapidly evolving technology on a globe that includes far more cell phones than toilets or people. To demand more clear proof of harm in this generation before taking steps to reduce those dangers in the next puts us and our children into an uncontrolled, potentially disastrous experiment. Who’s going to apologize for that?

Featured image credit: Air Contamination in Ningbo, Zhejiang, 2013-12-07 by 显 龙 – Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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The conservation of biodiversity: thinking afresh

In many walks of life there is much talk about “disruptive” developments which bring change that shatters the established way of doing things. In relation to the conservation of biodiversity, we can see two very different developments which might have such an effect on the conventional legal approaches. One is the inescapable external effect of climate change; the other is the new mind-set created by re-imagining the natural world in terms of ecosystem services.

Although major improvements have been made in recent decades, the world is falling well short of ending–far less reversing–the catastrophic degradation of biodiversity over past centuries. The dominant legal approach is to rely on “command and control” mechanisms to prevent harmful activities. These focus on identifying particular native species and introducing laws making it a crime to kill, capture, or harm them. Areas of land of particular value are also designated, and controls imposed on activities that might have an adverse effect on them. Such mechanisms are producing positive (although not sufficient) results, but their continuing dominance is challenged by the disruptive developments noted above.

In the first place, the increasingly dynamic environment arising from our rapidly changing climate undermines attempts to protect sites and species in the traditional way. A site which today is an ideal home for rich and varied wildlife in future may be under water, as sea levels rise, or may be subject to completely different rainfall patterns or temperatures which no longer suit the present species mix. Species will have to move to find the conditions that suit them and the whole concept of “native” species is undermined as we see major shifts in populations. Long-term conservation requires measures which respond to such changes, preparing tomorrow’s homes for nature; a static, site-based approach will not succeed.

Secondly, there are new ways of thinking about nature and biodiversity. The Ecosystems Approach emphasises the inter-dependence of biodiversity and the need to protect whole ecosystems, not just a few sites and species. More radical is the recognition of Ecosystem Services, identifying the many ways in which the natural environment provides benefits to individuals and society at large in ways which are not captured by existing legal and commercial structures. Examples include storage and purification of water resources, pollination of crops, and aesthetic and spiritual benefits. Thinking about the value that these services provide and the relationships between providers and beneficiaries opens up new ways of regulating our impact on the environment. Structures should provide incentives for the provision of the services, supported by contributions from (or on behalf of) those who benefit from them.

Legal responses can include Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes, Biodiversity Offsetting and tax measures, all of which build on a recognition of the value of ecosystem services. The conservation of biodiversity thus becomes a task for the cumulative impact of many different arrangements between private parties, rather than the exclusive domain of centrally organised programmes run by public conservation bodies. In doing so, new forms of property rights may have to be recognised to provide the long-term relationships and security required to match the long natural cycles of features we wish to protect, such as woodland. There are significant challenges in terms of effectiveness, valuation and equivalence, accountability and ethical acceptability – do such measures amount to “selling nature” in a way that denies its true worth? But these are challenges that should be explored.

The conventional approach is becoming practically and conceptually outdated. Established species and habitat protection measures will continue to have an important role to play, but we need to think afresh about how different approaches can supplement and support them. There may be advantages in a more diverse “legal ecosystem,” with the conservation of biodiversity becoming a shared enterprise using the initiative and resources of a wider range of parties.

Headline image credit: Kinnoull Hill by Colin T. Reid, used with permission.

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Aesthetic surgery and Alzheimer’s risk

A growing body of scientific support for the notion that an individual’s attitudes toward aging and personal appearance could have profound effects upon physical and mental well-being. As a result, I began to wonder whether it’s possible that such attitudes may, in measurable ways, impact the development of specific diseases.

A recent study from the journal Psychology and Aging suggests that younger and middle-aged adults who held more negative age stereotypes faced a higher risk for Alzheimer’s later in life. The research, based on brain imaging and autopsy findings, found changes in related parts of the brain in participants who had more negative attitudes toward aging. (Data were collected over decades from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging.)

Some argue that pessimism about aging brings about more stress, which may be a factor in risk for Alzheimer’s. Research showing that individuals often suffer loss of self-esteem and a perceived diminishing of sexual identity, social power, social visibility, and position in the workplace as psychological effects of an aging appearance. Interestingly, a 2005 study of 60- to 92-year-olds, from the journal International Journal of Eating Disorders, found that negative views of aging were especially prevalent in those who watched more television. In the same way unrealistic images of beauty in the media negatively impact women’s body image, negative stereotyping of older people in the media appears to have an adverse effect on the elderly.

Regardless of the precipitator, for many individuals, these feelings are productive of high levels of stress. If stress is indeed a factor in the development of Alzheimer’s, then one can certainly see how negative perceptions of aging could possibly contribute to increased risk for this debilitating disease. So what can the public do to remediate stress and potentially reduce their own risk of Alzheimer’s now or, more specifically, as they age?

As a practicing aesthetic surgeon, I call on professionals in my own field, as well as other specialists – in particular neurologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists – to research the potential of body modification to improve one’s body image attitudes and contribute to the reduction of stress as result. I believe this is a promising area for long-term study.

Attitudes about aging could, directly or indirectly through stress or other mechanisms, affect brain chemistry. Having a more positive attitude toward growing older may result when individuals feel empowered to exert greater control over their own personal aging process through aesthetic interventions. A study conducted at the Mayo Clinic and presented at a meeting of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) suggests that women who undergo a facelift may live more than 10 years longer than those who do not. Although a variety of factors might be responsible for the difference in longevity, the study’s authors acknowledge “self-esteem and life optimism” could be contributory. Recently the Aesthetic Surgery Journal published an editorial by Dr. Steven Dayan who proposes that mood elevation may be related to the concept of happiness, or the so-called “facial-feedback hypothesis, which suggests that the emotion follows the expression.” Moreover, aesthetic surgeons should take an aggressive role in anti-aging research. A substantial part of an aesthetic surgeon’s day is meeting with patients, and helping them decide what treatments may benefit them, including anti-aging treatments and surgical procedures.

Let me be clear—I am not suggesting a marketing campaign to promote aesthetic surgery as a preventative treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, far from it. But this connection is worthy of broader research and discussion. The power of aesthetic surgery to change lives is something we talk about a lot, but are less often able to prove scientifically. With more research and a better understanding about this link, physicians, researchers, and patients could potentially see benefits across medical specialties.

Featured image credit: Ages by Luisb. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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How much of a threat does the “Brexit” referendum pose for the European Union?

Following the announcement of the so-called “Brexit” referendum on 20 February 2016 journalists and bloggers have discussed the “ins” and “outs” of EU membership, focusing on the arguments for and against, on interpreting the polls, and on reflecting on the success of the Leave and Remain camps during the first weeks of the pre-campaign period. Subject to fewer column inches, however, are the implications of the 23 June 2016 referendum for the EU and the future of European integration. What, then, might those implications be?

First, it is clear that the referendum reinforces the perception of a European Union in crisis. It presents this crisis as being of an existential order. The cumulative effect of the Euro crisis, the refugee crisis, the perennial EU’s legitimacy crisis and the “rule of law” crisis (affecting Hungary and Poland) presents an image of the EU as a body that cannot solve its own problems, and which seems unable within its own territory to defend its core liberal-democratic values, as European states seeming to shift ever more towards chaos and illiberalism often taking the form of socio-economic protectionism and political introversion.

Second, the referendum would seem to offer encouragement to other member states that might view the UK decision as a kind of a model. An increasing number of EU states are now lead by Eurosceptic governments, or have witnessed an increase in support for Eurosceptic parties. While other EU referendums have been held on treaty revisions and other policy matters, the UK referendum sets a precedent as an in-out referendum. A worst-case scenario may be that this creates a domino effect as political leaders across Europe reflect on whether it is also time for them to renegotiate, or even reconsider their country’s EU membership.

Third, the referendum is informed by the new British settlement in the EU which, amongst other things, promises treaty change to accommodate the UK’s national interests and allows the UK to not be committed to “the ever closer union of the peoples of Europe,” a principle that has governed European integration since its inception. This approach to accommodate national preferences through exceptionalism, enhances the dynamic of integration “à la carte,” which will lead to a more flexible but less cohesive European Union while offering incentives for member states to focus on short-term political interests rather than long-term common European challenges and solutions.

Fourth, the referendum weakens the EU’s international standing and the confidence that non-EU states have in the EU. Viewed from China, India and the United States, for example, the absence of European solidarity exemplified by the Brexit referendum suggests a weak and divided Europe which is in decline, if not disintegrating. For the first time (setting aside the Greenland, Algeria and Saint Barthélémy experiences), the EU could shrink in size, a prospect which goes against conventional wisdoms that see progress in the EU bound up with forward steps in integration and enlargement. It is hard to see the EU taken seriously in matters of global economy and politics under these circumstances as shifts of these order are likely to demand a period of introspection during which the nature of European integration is rethought. The prospect of global EU leadership on issues ranging from environmental protection to the exchange of anti-terrorist intelligence seems unlikely.

Fifth, the referendum both threatens and offers hope for regional actors pushing for further devolution or even independence. It is a threat because it demonstrates how regional interests might be undermined in a “national” referendum, where a minority view on membership might be squeezed out. During the British renegotiation and current campaign, EU membership has been presented as a matter for central government to determine exclusively. It could offer some hope, however, for supporters of secession, who look at the Scottish debate and the possibility of another independence referendum should Scotland vote to stay but the rest of the UK to leave, as an example of how an in-out referendum might strengthen their independence narrative.

In all the issues raised above, the UK referendum alone does not make or break the European Union. It is not even likely to be a final nail in its coffin. However, it does exacerbate and reinforce existing trends and challenges facing the European Union today. It is the cumulative effect of these trends that may pose for the EU an existential threat. The inability of the EU to manage successfully the refugee crisis; the negative socio-economic effects of the measures imposed on some countries to address the financial crisis in the Eurozone; an enhanced nationalism and self-referential political discourse as citizens express their disaffection with an elite-driven European project, are all compounded by the announcement to hold an in/out referendum in the UK.

Image credit: “European Union” by Yukiko Matsuoka, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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“What’s in a name?”: Was William Shakespeare popular during his lifetime?

It’s 1608. You are passing by the bookstall of the publisher Thomas Pavier on Cornhill, a stone’s throw from the elegant colonnades of London’s Royal Exchange, when something catches your eye: a sensational play dramatising a series of real-life gruesome domestic murders. A Yorkshire Tragedy has that enticing whiff of scandal about it, but what persuades you to part with your hard-earned cash is seeing the dramatist’s name proudly emblazoned on the title-page: “Written by W. Shak[e]speare”. But you have been duped.

Pavier had published this play with a false authorial attribution. It is not now believed to be by Shakespeare, but the fact that it was marketed as such tells us something about the selling-power attached to his name by this point in his career.

Shakespeare’s early printed plays did not capitalise on his public identity in their title-pages. More often than not it was the name of the playing company—normally derived from the title of the nobleman who was its patron—that received top billing, allowing the publisher to make the most of the prestige which radiated from the likes of the “right Honourable” Earl of Pembroke or the Lord Hunsdon, who was Queen Elizabeth I’s Lord Chamberlain. Shakespeare’s own popularity would therefore largely have been bound up with that of the theatrical troupes to which he had become attached.

Shakespeare did, however, make something of a splash on his own account in 1593 when his most successful printed work during his lifetime was published by fellow Stratfordian Richard Field: the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. This ran through a total of ten editions before his death. In 1594 a second long poem, The Rape of Lucrece, appeared in print and would be graced by a total of six editions by 1616. The immense popularity of the narrative poems has led many scholars to argue that, during his own age, Shakespeare was primarily known first and foremost as a poet. The copious praises showered on these verses by contemporaries might seem at first to bear this out. For instance, in his Palladis Tamia of 1598, Francis Meres exclaimed rapturously that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets.”

Title page of the first quarto of Love’s Labours Lost. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Meres, however, had been equally enthusiastic about Shakespeare as “the most excellent” author of both comedies and tragedies. Around half of Shakespeare’s plays were published during his lifetime. It’s true to say that arguably his most popular play, Henry IV, Part 1—with its raucous cowardly knight Falstaff, who helped sell a sequel in the form of Henry IV, Part 2, and a comic spin-off, The Merry Wives of Windsor—was not as saleable as Venus and Adonis, running to a total of six editions. However, a valuable survey by Lukas Erne on “The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print,” calculates the total number of editions of the plays during the dramatist’s lifetime. The results are surprising. There were 45 editions of Shakespeare’s theatrical works by 1616. This is more than double the total number of editions of his poems, even if we include publisher William Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim, which included pirated poems by Shakespeare as well as verses plagiarised from other poets but attributed to him. Perhaps not coincidentally this was published only a year after Shakespeare’s name first started to appear on the title pages to some of his plays—with a name-check on reprints of Richard II, Richard III and Love’s Labour’s Lost—suggesting that Jaggard may have been as influenced by Shakespeare’s popularity as a dramatist as much as by his reputation as a poet.

Indeed, before the playwright’s death the rate of title-page ascriptions to him far outstripped those notched up by any of the other theatrical heavyweights of the period—including Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker—sometimes by more than double. By the mid-point in his career “Shakespeare” was becoming a name to conjure with, and by the turn of the century, as Erne reveals, his published works represented an extraordinary 4% of the total number of printed books issued in 1600. This is a sizeable slice of the market for one author. Shakespeare’s name was clearly shifting publishers’ stock.

Of course you can’t please them all. Shakespeare and the Chamberlain’s Men weren’t, it appears, popular with everyone. In 1596 the company’s attempts to open a brand-new indoor theatre in the Blackfriars district of London were thwarted by 30 angry neighbours who were less than pleased at the prospect of a “common playhouse” on their doorstep. Led by the redoubtable self-styled dowager Countess Elizabeth Russell, this stunning act of early nimbyism proved successful and forced the players into a new venture, the Globe. In 1599 Shakespeare became a sharer and, in effect, part-owner of a playhouse on Bankside with a seating capacity of at least 3000, and was entitled to reap 10% of the profits to boot. Such figures indicate that we might be underestimating the extent of his popularity if we take into account his presence on the London book stalls alone.

Shakespeare’s career received a further boost in 1603 when the Chamberlain’s Men were accorded the honour of royal patronage, becoming the King’s Men. This significantly added to the theatrical troupe’s public status and increased the opportunities for court performances. By the end of 1608 they had also re-acquired the Blackfriars Theatre. As this was an indoor playhouse, unlike the open-air Globe, the company could now play all year round to even greater numbers. While playwrights like Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Middleton had, during their lifetimes, box-office hits which surpassed any recorded runs of individual plays by Shakespeare, the latter’s numerous business dealings and investments—including New Place, famously the second largest house in Stratford; the Blackfriars Gatehouse, a building close to the indoor playhouse; not to mention his stake in two theatres—indicate that he was popular enough with audiences and theatrical professionals to have carved out a career which allowed him to acquire a respectable, even considerable, level of wealth.

Popularity, however, doesn’t necessarily just mean getting paying customers through the playhouse doors. Shakespeare’s collected plays appeared in 1623 in a lavish Folio edition, now known as the ‘First Folio’. This was not a book for every purse. Works in this larger format were expensive luxury items and normally reserved for weighty legal, religious and historiographical tomes, or for revered classical texts. Those who put the First Folio together were therefore making a statement about Shakespeare’s cultural value as a literary figure which went beyond mass appeal alone. Ultimately though, in doing so, they ensured that his popularity would be, in the eulogising words of Ben Jonson which preface the volume, “not of an age, but for all time.”

So, what’s in a name? Well, when it comes to assessing Shakespeare’s popularity, it seems a great deal. But in the crowded market for plays in a Renaissance England buzzing with theatrical talent, this can only ever tell half the story.

Featured image credit: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies or The First Folio. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Temporal liars

One of the most famous, and most widely discussed, paradoxes is the Liar paradox, which arises when we consider the status of the Liar sentence:

This sentence is false.

The Liar sentence is true if and only if it is false, and thus can be neither (unless it can be both).

The variants of the Liar that I want to consider in this instalment arise by taking the implicit temporal aspect of the word “is” in the Liar paradox seriously. In other words, we can understand the Liar sentence as saying of itself that it is true at this very moment. Thus, the Liar is equivalent to:

This sentence is currently, at this very moment false.

But what if we replace the present-tense “is” with future or past-tense verbs such as “will be”, “was”, and the like?

Before considering such constructions, we need to be a bit clear about how we are going to understand various tensed expressions. Informally, if I say “It will always be the case that P”, I might be claiming that P is true right now and will continue to be true at every point in time in the future, or I might merely be claiming that P will will be true at every point in time after the present one, but claiming nothing whatsoever regarding whether or not P is true at the present moment. Here we will assume the latter understanding. More generally:

“P will be true” means that P holds at some point in time after the present moment.

“P will always be true” mean that P holds at every point in time after the present moment.

“P was true” means that P holds at some point in time before the present moment.

“P was always be the case” means that P holds at every point in time before the present moment.

Similar equivalences hold for sentences of the form “P will be false.”, etc. Finally, we will assume that there is no first or last point in time: for any moment, there is at least one moment before that one and at least one moment after that one.

Now, let’s consider the following self-referential sentences about the future:

[1]:       This sentence will be false.

[2]:       This sentence will always be false.

Loosely put, [1] is true at a time if and only if it is false at some later time, and [2] is true at a time if and only if it is false at every later time. Both of these sentences are paradoxical:

Assume (for reductio) that [1] is false at some time t1. Then it is not the case that [1] will ever be false at any point in time after t1. So at every point in time after t1, [1] is true. Let t2 be any point in time after t1. Then [1] is true at every point after t2. So [1] is false at t2. But t2 is after t1, so [1] is also true at t2. Contradiction. So [1] cannot be false at t1, and must be true at t1. Moment t1 was arbitrary, however. Hence, [1] is true at every moment in time. But then [1] is true at every time after t1. But then [1] is false at t1, and so once again we have a contradiction.

Assume (for reductio) that [2] is true at some time t1. Then [2] will be false at any point in time after t1. Let t2 be any point in time after t1. Then [2] is false at every point after t2. So [2] is true at t2. But t2 is after t1, so [2] is also false at t2. Contradiction. So [2] cannot be true at t1, and must be false at t1. Moment t1 was arbitrary, however. Hence, [2] is false at every moment in time. But then [2] is false at every time after t1. But then [2] is true at t1, and we have our contradiction.

Similar arguments (obtained by simple modifications of the arguments just given) show that both of:

[3]:        This sentence was false.

[4]:        This sentence was always false.

are paradoxical.

These variants on the Liar paradox are interesting for the following reason: although they look similar to the present-tense Liar, the reasoning to a contradiction does not look like the simple argument typically used to generate a contradiction from the Liar sentence. Instead, the argument looks much more like the reasoning typically used to show that the apparently non-circular but equally paradoxical Yablo paradox:

S1:        For all n > 1, Sn if false.

S2:        For all n > 2, Sn is false.

:           :

Sn:        For all n > m, Sn is false.

Sm+1:     For all n > n+1, Sn is false.

:           :

is paradoxical. None of the temporal Liars [1] through [4] involves an infinitely descending, non-circular sequence of sentences, however, so at first glance it might be puzzling why the argument for a contradiction in each case looks more like the Yablo paradox reasoning and less like the Liar reasoning. After all, these temporal Liar paradoxes seem to be circular in exactly the same manner as is the Liar sentence.

The reason why the temporal Liars are more Yablo-like than we might have initially expected, however, is easy to identity: Although each temporal Liar paradox only involves a single sentence, bringing in (infinitely many) different points in time via the use of tensed verbs means that we must consider the truth-value of this single sentence at all past, or at all future, times rather than merely considering what (single, univocal) truth value it has in the present. The Yablo paradox involves infinitely many distinct sentences, where for each sentence we need to consider what truth-value it might have in the present. The temporal paradoxes involve a single sentence, but in assessing them we need to consider what truth-value is might have at each of infinitely many different points in time.

I’ll conclude by providing the reader with a few additional examples to explore. In particular, note that we can combine more than one temporal operator such as “will be” and “always was” and obtain more complicated temporal Liar sentences such as:

[5]:        It will be the case that this sentence was always false.

[6]:        It always was the case that this sentence will be false.

Of course, lots of other combinations are possible. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine whether some, all, or none of these more complicated constructions are paradoxical.

Featured image: Blue spheres, by Splitshire. CC0 public domain via Pexels.

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Beyond words: How language-like is emoji?

The decision by Oxford Dictionaries to select an emoji as the 2015 Word of the Year has led to incredulity in some quarters. Hannah Jane Parkinson, writing in The Guardian, and doubtless speaking for many, brands the decision ‘ridiculous’ — after all, an emoji is, self-evidently, not a word; so the wagging fingers seem to say. And indeed, the great English word is, for many, the most sacred cornerstone of ‘our magnificent bastard tongue’, as John McWhorter so aptly dubs the language of Shakespeare. But is such derision really warranted? After all, we live in a brave new digital age. And the media we use to connect and communicate with our nearest and dearest, as well as a virtual world peopled by ‘followers’ and ‘friends’ we’ve never met, surely requires somewhat different communicative systems. And systems, such as emoji, are adaptations to this most recent arena of human discursive intercourse. They get the job done when the tried and tested interpersonal cues, that oil spoken interaction, are impossible or absent. But is emoji, which is most definitely a communicative system, so different from language?

The communicative functions of language

English, like any other natural language, has two major communicative functions. The first is an ideational function: to get an idea across, as when I say, It’s raining, or I love you. It also has an interactive-interpersonal function: to influence the attitudes and behaviours of others, and, in a myriad ways, change an aspect of the world’s states of affairs in the process. This can range from the mundane, as when I ask someone to shut the door on the way out, ensuring the door’s position conforms to my wishes. But its influence can also be rather more significant, as when a member of the clergy pronounces two individuals, husband and wife, concluding an act of marriage, and thereby transforming the moral, romantic, financial, and legal status of the two individuals vis-à-vis one another.

But emoji can also fulfil these two major functions. In January 2015, a 17 year old from Brooklyn, Osiris Aristy, was arrested for making an alleged ‘terroristic threat’ based on the NY terrorism statutes introduced after 9/11. His alleged crime was posting a public status update on his Facebook page threatening NY police officers. But what was unusual was that the alleged threat was made up solely of emojis: a police officer emoji, with handgun emojis pointing at it.

The NY District Attorney, in deciding whether to issue an arrest warrant, used the communicative standards that apply to language: his, perhaps reasonable, inference, was that the teenager was threatening gun violence towards the NYPD. And indeed, when his home was raided, Aristy was found to have a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver. While, ultimately, a Grand Jury declined to indict Aristy, and the case was dropped, Aristy’s emojis were evaluated in the same way as if he had written ‘gonna shoot a cop’. The legal question, and judgement, turned on whether the two self-same communicative functions of language also applied to his alleged emoji offence: did the meaning conveyed by the emojis amount to an attempt to influence the behaviour of others, and incite gun violence, or indeed, represent an intention to cause harm, himself, to New York’s Finest. In short, did he mean to go through with it? Was this merely foolish chatter, or a cold-blooded threat? And that, in itself, is a salutary lesson; in terms of digital communication, others are liable to interpret our intentions as much from our emojis, as the words we type — emojis matter: they can and will be used against you in a court of law.

What’s in a sign?

In the absence of telepathy, humans have language. And language works extremely well because it enables us to coordinate our action and interaction — for better and for worse. Language is arguably the world’s most powerful instrument for getting our thoughts across and changing minds in the process: mental states that are powerful, long-lasting, and can be all-consuming.           

Language achieves this by using signs — a physical representation — which stands for a particular idea. For instance, the English word dog, made up of the three sound segments represented phonetically as /dɒg/ enables the speaker to convey an idea, allowing the addressee to conjure up a mental idea: the notion of a dog. In this, there is no causal relationship between the sign and the idea it calls to mind. After all, the English sign, /dɒg/, doesn’t look or sound like the entity it represents. And different languages make use of very different signs to evoke the same idea, for instance, cicing in Balinese, gos in Catalan, skyliin modern Greek, kutya in Hungarian, gae in Korean, and pies in Polish. In short, the signs used by English, and other languages, are symbols. They enable great flexibility in communicative expression, as a symbol doesn’t have to be connected, in the here and now, to the thing it stands for.

In this, emoji seems to function, at least on the face of it, in quite a different way. After all, signs in emoji are icons: there is, often, a direct causal relationship between the sign, and the idea it calls up. The smiley or winking faces look like, more or less, the ideas that they attempt to convey. So does this mean that, on this score, emoji is quite unlike language?

Not really. After all, it is well-known that there are a large class of signs, in English, that are based on iconicity. One example of this is words for entities that represent the sound made by the entity in question. For instance, the English word buzz describes the sound emitted by a bee. And it is does so in an iconic way: the sign sounds like the thing it represents. And in this way, language also exhibits an iconic based, just like emoji, for formulating the signs that it makes use of.

Type of sound
Onomatopoeias


Human vocal sounds
achoo, babbling, gargle, hiccup, hum, etc.


Human actions
smack, thump, etc.


Physical contact, movement or combustion
splat, boom, fizz, plop, whizz, slosh, swish, etc.


Sounds produced by devices
beep, ding ding, tick tock, vroom, zap, zip, etc.


Things names after the sounds they produce
choo choo (train), flip-flops, etc.


Animal names
cuckoo, dodo, etc.


Animal sounds
bleat, buzz, chirp, hiss, hoot, meow, moo,purr, quack, ribbit, woof, etc.

Some examples of iconic signs in English, known as ‘onomatopoeias’, from Greek, meaning ‘echo sound’.

Moreover, the motivation for signs in emoji can be symbolic, just as is typically the case with spoken language. A particularly striking example of this concerns the three wise monkey emojis:

The three wise monkeys depict a pictorial maxim: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. In the Western tradition, this is typically interpreted as advice not to turn a blind eye to inappropriate behaviour or conduct. But this maxim derives from Japanese tradition, probably via the teachings of Confucius, whose sayings include the following: ‘Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety’. The pictorial representation for the homily probably derives from a 17th-century woodcarving Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan. The carving, which features Japanese Macaque monkeys, a species common in Japan, uses the macaque to represent the human life journey. But while this is a pictorial trope — holding the hands over the eyes, for instance, stands for not being able to see — the point is, there is nothing about three Japanese macaques, with their hands over various parts of their physiognomies which iconically resembles the meaning of the maxim; you and I just have to know that the image relates to a particular idea. In short, this is a primarily symbolic representation: the meaning conveyed by the image is motivated, only very indirectly, by an iconic relationship. Hence, on this score, emoji is very much language-like indeed.

A final point, here, is that some linguistic systems function perfectly effectively, just like emoji, in being largely iconic in nature. While we often think of language as meaning spoken language, sign languages are the functional equals of spoken language: sign language users manage to communicate extremely successfully without sound. But the point here is that much of the motivation for signs, in sign language, is ultimately iconic rather than symbolic in nature, a function of the manual-gestural modality sign language makes use of. For instance, the ASL signs for CHEERFUL, HAPPY, and EXCITED all make use of an upward motion. And many linguists believe that positive states are iconically motivated by the human experience of being more upright, when feeling positive, He was feeling on top of the world, while negative experiences are iconically motivated by a lower posture, She’s down in the dumps.

The organization of language

Finally, language is organized into an inventory of vocabulary items — what linguists refer to as a mental lexicon — and a system of grammatical rules, that enable us to compose our words into well-formed spoken (or signed) utterances. How does emoji fare here?

For most people, and most of the time, emojis are used to add a personal voice to digital text—they don’t have a system of grammatical rules. In this it fulfils a communicative value similar to intonation in spoken language, as I explain elsewhere. And in the domain of emotional expression, emoji enables us to use single glyphs to convey a complex spectrum of emotional experience. A case in point is the ‘laughing face with tears of joy’, selected as Oxford Dictionaries 2015 Word of the Year, which takes many more text characters to convey than a single emoji, and without the immediacy of the empathic resonance the glyph achieves

MPSA’s 74th annual conference re-cap

Earlier this month, we touched down in Chicago, Illinois for the Midwest Political Science Association’s 74th Annual Conference. We may not have loved the snowy weather in April, but we really enjoyed seeing so many of our authors and other visitors who stopped by the OUP booth. Both @OUPPolitics and @mpsanet were busy live tweeting, and you can see some of the conference activity by checking out #MPSA16 or #MPSA2016. OUP also manned a table at the Tech Demo Station, where conference attendees could stop by to learn more about the interactive tool, Social Explorer.

 

Seth Masket takes a minute at our OUP booth to take a picture with his latest book “The Inevitable Party”
The man of the hour, Arthur Lupia poses with his  title “Uninformed” at the OUP Booth
Nadia E. Brown had her hands full at MPSA, but she made time to show off “Sisters in the Statehouse”

M PSA Top Sellers

Arthur Lupia’s Uninformed: Why People Seem to Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do about It
Lawrence Jacobs’ and Desmond King’s Fed Power: How Finance Wins
Edward Foley’s Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States
Mark D. Brewer and Jeffrey M. Stonecash’s Polarization and the Politics of Personal Responsibility

We’d like to thank everyone who attended or participated via social media.

Featured Image Credit: “Chicago” by Tony Webster CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr

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