Cabra, Martina

2024, Zittoun, Tania, Cabra, Martina

In this paper, we propose a sociocultural perspective to consider affects in older age. The psychology of learning throughout the whole life course, including in the life of older adults, suggest that affects play an important role. However, developmental psychology has paid little attention to affects in learning and development, and even less to these aspects in older age. We believe that it is important to examine affects in older age because of their centrality in the lifecourse; but how to account for them? We propose the notion of thematic engagement to highlight the role of affects in older persons' learning and development, and to designate transversal and pluri-thematic interests across activities and domains of knowledge, which enable us to show that some topics, domains or interests become more important than others for a given person across time. We base our claims on a longitudinal study of older people engaging in different activities at home, in their neighbourhood, as well as in a daycare centre for older people, and provide three dialogical exemplars. We finally highlight some theoretical and empirical implications of our proposition.

2020, Zittoun, Tania, Cabra, Martina

Daydreaming can be defined as the process by which we partly or fully decouple from what seems to be one’s current activity in the world. It usually designates “anything one may be thinking about that does not pertain to the task in which one is currently involved” (Pereira and Diriwächter, 2008). Occurring within our flow of consciousness, it entails fantasy or a form of diurnal dreaming. Daydreaming can be more or less deliberate, have more or less clear goals, be more or less structured, and have diverse types of outcomes. Authors usually distinguish daydreams that may enrich people’s relation to themselves, or their relation to the world, from those which seem not to enrich experiences. Most authors admit that daydreaming participates to our capacity to deal with our experiences and opens up new possibilities.