Media releases

• Brock, TD working together to improve physical and mental well-being of Niagara seniors

  Monday, January 10, 2022 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 10 January 2022 – R0002

  For older adults, going to the gym is about more than just physical exercise. As one of the populations most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, working out among their peers is also a doorway out of isolation and into renewed friendships and socialization.

  Through Brock University’s SeniorFit program, offered by the Brock-Niagara Centre for Health and Well-Being, hundreds of Niagara residents 55 years and older are getting that much-needed physical and mental health boost while training in a safe environment. Located on Lockhart Drive in St. Catharines, the Centre offers a gym full of all types of workout equipment, one-on-one training, and both in-person and online fitness classes.

  “Research shows exercise is good for the body and mind,” said Centre for Health and Well-Being Director Deborah O’Leary. “It allows for older adults to continue their daily activities and has shown to help with a number of mental health issues. And there’s a social aspect as well, which is also really important.”

  Through a multi-year grant from TD Bank Group (TD), more resources will be committed to an important community resource with the goal of removing barriers and further promoting health and well-being among older adults.

  “TD is proud to work with Brock University in promoting the physical, psychological and social well-being of seniors, a population disproportionately impacted by the ongoing pandemic,” said Amy Hanen, TD Associate Vice President, Social Impact Canada. “Through the TD Ready Commitment, the Bank’s global corporate citizenship platform, we’re focused on supporting innovative solutions like the SeniorFit program that will help increase access to health education, and early detection and intervention of cardiovascular and chronic conditions.”

  The grant from TD will allow the Brock-Niagara Centre to expand its SeniorFit program across the Niagara region through satellite programs in a number of municipalities. By bringing the programming to the communities, the goal is to reduce the occurrences and severity of chronic conditions and other illnesses.

  “It really puts the programming where people are and makes it much easier for seniors to access it,” said SeniorFit Director Kim Gammage. “This donation from TD is allowing us to do things we always wanted to do, but we wouldn’t have been able to do it without this funding.”

  A full needs assessment will also be completed to identify other potential areas for growth, while a research project will be conducted to evaluate the positive impacts the Centre’s programs are having on its members.

  The purpose and impact of the funding also aligns closely with Brock’s priority of enhancing the life and vitality of the community it is a part of.

  “Brock University is deeply grateful for the support we have received in the past from TD and with this most recent contribution,” said Brock University Interim President Lynn Wells. “This is a great example of two organizations working together to achieve a common goal of helping improve the health of Canadians of all ages.”

  In addition to the benefits provided to its members, the Centre as an important experiential learning space for students in Brock’s Kinesiology, Health Sciences, Therapeutic Recreation, Nursing and Gerontology programs. As many as 200 students work in the Centre’s various programs each year.

  “The students get a lot of real-world experience, but the members thoroughly enjoy having the students here, so it’s really an inter-generational benefit,” said O’Leary. “Without the students here, it wouldn’t be the same. The members look forward to interacting with them every day.”

  Faculty of Applied Health Sciences Dean Peter Tiidus said the multi-year commitment from TD means an exciting future for the Centre and specifically the SeniorFit program.

  “This generous funding provides a secure foundation for what has become an important resource to the community,” he said. “It will allow us to grow the programming, which will benefit students, seniors and the Niagara community.”

  For more information about the Brock-Niagara Centre for Health and Well-Being or its programs, visit brocku.ca/health-well-being 

  A video about TD’s support of the Brock-Niagara Centre for Health and Well-Being is available on YouTube.

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews: 

  * Dan Dakin, Manager Communications and Media Relations, Brock University ddakin@brocku.ca or 905-347-1970

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  Categories: Media releases

• New research shows how language use in parliament reflects emotion, power

  Thursday, January 06, 2022 | By Brock University

  MEDIA RELEASE: 6 January 2022 – R0001

  As COVID-19 case counts rose in Canada in 2020, the use of positive language rose in Canadian parliament.

  The finding may be counterintuitive, but according to the authors of a new Brock University paper, it’s in keeping with a stable correlation between politicians’ word choices and both the political and social dynamics of the day.

  Jordan Gallant (MA ’20) and Professor Gary Libben in the Department of Applied Linguistics published “Power and Positivity: Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Word Valence in Canadian Parliament” in Frontiers in Communication last month.

  In it, they show the level of positive valence, or emotional evocativeness, in words chosen by members of parliament in Canada follows predictable, stable patterns based on party lines and number of seats, as well as non-partisan factors, even as individual politicians may come and go from office.

  Gallant and Libben identified the patterns by completing a computerized statistical analysis of the Hansard, the curated public record of parliamentary proceedings, using a database of word valence created in 2013. The database includes some 13,000 words ranked for emotional valence by more than 1,800 participants. These were compared with more than 92 million words in the Hansard from 2006 to 2021.

  Gallant says he and Libben considered two possible explanations for the increase in positive language as the pandemic worsened.

  “It’s challenging for public policy to keep pace in an unpredictable and ever-worsening crisis, so the positive language use we observed during the pandemic may have reflected efforts to come together in the face of non-partisan issues,” says Gallant, noting a similar pattern of positive language use emerged during minority governments, which required higher levels of co-operation.

  “An alternative view is that our results reflect Canadian politicians’ sense of optimism,” says Gallant. “At the peak of each COVID-19 wave, case counts were high but projected future case counts were often levelling off or decreasing, so the more positive language use may have reflected a more hopeful outlook on the future.”

  Libben, whose previous research has demonstrated that people’s responses to words are automatic, says that politicians as expert language users are likely well aware of the emotional impact of words.

  “You can’t be a politician if you’re not a people person with high levels of social skill and interpersonal empathy,” says Libben. “A big part of that is language. It corresponds completely to everything we know about language that politicians become mirrors of public discourse, as reflected in these findings around COVID-19.”

  The analysis does not account for the context of word use, only the words themselves, and yet, the results are consistently reflective of the trends identified by the researchers. For example, in the sentence ‘there’s nothing horrible going on,’ both “nothing” and “horrible” might rate negatively in the database even though the complete sentence has a positive meaning. But the results of the study still show that the positive valence tracks with social and political circumstances over time — another finding Libben finds quite interesting.

  The study, undertaken as part of the Words in the World Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant led by Libben, was outside of the usual area of study for the two psycholinguists, who typically focus more on how language is processed.

  “We were talking about Brexit and wondering if we could measure how language heats up and has political consequences in the world, and how people’s emotional states are measurable through their language use,” says Libben. “That’s what first led us to the Hansard, and then COVID-19 happened so quickly and became a great case to examine language heating up or being cooled down.”

  Gallant, now a PhD student in the Cognitive Science of Language at McMaster, says the study opens up possibilities for future research because it shows the potential for comparative linguistic analyses of the Hansard, which is used in 25 countries and is freely available to the public.

  For more information or for assistance arranging interviews: 

  * Dan Dakin, Manager Communications and Media Relations, Brock University ddakin@brocku.ca or 905-347-1970

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  Categories: Media releases