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The thesis brings together philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific theories of affect in developing a dual process account of emotion. Philosophers and psychologists who take a cognitivist view claim that emotions in humans and other mammalian species require intentionality, arising as the product of evaluations which bear upon our survival or wellbeing, whereas neuroscientists conclude from their research that emotion has its foundations in subcortical affect mechanisms by which behaviours may arise as spontaneous responses to valuable stimuli. Parts I and II of the thesis examine these two accounts, which are construed as cognitive-evaluative and primitive emotional processes respectively. It is further proposed that both these manifestations of emotion are to be found in mammalian species. Given that cognitive-evaluative and primitive emotional states can be demonstrated to coexist and function separately in mammalian species, how do we explain cases in which the two pro...

We investigated whether losses of inhibitory control could be responsible for some friendly-fire incidents. Several factors are commonly cited to explain friendly-fire incidents, but failure of inhibitory control has not yet been explored. The Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) could be a valid model for inhibition failures in some combat scenarios. Participants completed small-arms simulations using near infrared emitter guns, confronting research assistants acting as friends or foes. In Experiment 1, seven participants completed three conditions with three different proportions of foes (high, medium, low). In Experiment 2, 13 participants completed high-foe (high-go) and low-foe (low-go) versions of a small-arms simulation as well as comparative computer tasks. Participants made more friendly-fire errors (errors of commission) when foe proportion was high. A speed-accuracy trade-off was apparent, with participants who were faster to fire on foes also more likely to accide...

Child abuse is a major public health problem. In order to establish the prevalence of abuse exposure among children, measures need to be age-appropriate, sensitive, reliable and valid. This study aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire Abuse Short Form (ACE-ASF). The ACE-ASF is an 8-item, retrospective self-report questionnaire measuring lifetime physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Data from a nationally representative sample of 15-year-old, school-going adolescents (n=1733, 55.5% female) from the Romanian Health Behavior in School-Based Children Study 2014 (HBSC) were analyzed. The factorial structure of the ACE-ASF was tested with Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmed using Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Measurement invariance was examined across sex, and internal reliability and concurrent criterion validity were established. Violence exposure was high: 39.7% physical, 32.2% emotional and 13.1% sexual ab...

Original Practices Shakespeare calls for a specific mode of performance exemplifying a strong unity of thought, action, and speech. Sometimes called Living Thought, actors must realize this state within a typically short OP rehearsal process while maintaining tight, rapid pacing emblematic of the form. This thesis examines Living Thought as a state of psychophysical fluency and asks how a psychophysical approach to OP rehearsal practice can enable actors to manifest it. The research demonstrates how Living Thought can be contextualized and explicated through a psychophysical perspective, constructed through a consideration of existing psychophysical performance practices, especially those of Konstantin Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, Bella Merlin, and Phillip Zarrilli, and the psychophysical work of specialists in vocal performance including Cicely Berry and Kristin Linklater. This thesis establishes the principal conventions of OP Shakespeare and asks how and to what extent an appro...

How do we assess what we remember? Previous work on metacognition suggests that confidence judgments are more accurate when given after than before a response to a perceptual task. Here we present two experiments that investigate the influence of decision and response on metacognitive accuracy in a memory task so as to establish what kind of information people use to assess their memory content. Participants were asked to remember lists of words and then to decide which of two target words had previously been presented. In both experiments, participants rated their confidence either after or before the response. However, the experiments differed in the amount of information provided for confidence rating. In Experiment 1, before confidence rating, participants were either presented with both target words and asked to decide between them, or they were only presented with a cue (first letter of the subsequent target words). In Experiment 2, participants were always presented with a ta...

Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children. It was asked whether a cut-off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English-speaking children. Thirty-five bilingual 2;6-year-olds exposed to British Engli...

Child abuse is a major public health problem. In order to establish the prevalence of abuse exposure among children, measures need to be age-appropriate, sensitive, reliable and valid. This study aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Questionnaire Abuse Short Form (ACE-ASF). The ACE-ASF is an 8-item, retrospective self-report questionnaire measuring lifetime physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Data from a nationally representative sample of 15-year-old, school-going adolescents (n=1733, 55.5% female) from the Romanian Health Behavior in School-Based Children Study 2014 (HBSC) were analyzed. The factorial structure of the ACE-ASF was tested with Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmed using Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Measurement invariance was examined across sex, and internal reliability and concurrent criterion validity were established. Violence exposure was high: 39.7% physical, 32.2% emotional and 13.1% sexual ab...