Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterised by intrusions into conscious thinking by repetitive, personally abhorrent, absurd and alien thoughts (obsessions) which lead to endless repetitive acts or rehearsal of irrational and sometimes bizarre mental and behavioural ri…
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Sentiment analysis focuses upon automatic classiffication of a document's sentiment (and more generally extraction of opinion from text). Ways of expressing sentiment have been shown to be dependent on what a document is about (domain-dependency). This complicates supervised met…
Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) offer the potential for new modes of social interaction for children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). Familiar objects that are embedded with digital technology may help children with autism understand the actions of others by providing feed…
This thesis applies self-categorization theory (SCT) to the behavioural and experiential dimensions of spatiality and crowding. A literature review in Chapter 2 will highlight the study of ‘personal space' as a dominant theoretical approach to understanding variable crowding exp…
Contrasting approaches to explaining the social-cognitive contributors to bullying in schools have stressed the importance of a child‘s social goals in determining whether he or she will bully. In spite of this, the social goals of bullies and victims have not been adequately in…
In human fear conditioning 'resistance to extinction' occurs when the removal of the aversive outcome fails to produce a reduction in conditioned responding. This phenomenon is important to understanding the persistence of anxiety disorders such as phobias. The research presente…
This thesis in part addressed a call by Hodapp, Glidden & Kaiser (2005) to focus on identifying potential mediators and moderators of the relationship between growing up with a sibling with an autism spectrum condition (ASC) and adverse outcomes such as poorer sibling relationsh…
The aim of this thesis was to investigate some of the processes that contribute to the effective comprehension of text in an adult population. The thesis begins with an assessment of component skills that are of theoretical relevance to reading comprehension skill. Experiment On…
The research presented in this thesis examined the roles of recollection and familiarity in the own-race bias (ORB) in recognition memory for faces. In Paper 1, Jacoby's (1991) process-dissociation procedure was used to estimate the relative contributions of recollection and fam…
Emotion is characterised by two-dimensions: emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, and arousal represents its intensity. Emotional content of verbal material affects cognitive processing, although research on word recognition has only…
Using people actively involved in mountain climbing, this thesis explores people's motivations to participate in mountain climbing, an activity frequently characterised in terms of risk. Moreover, using a variety of both quantitative and qualitative methods the assessment of the…
The role of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in modulating nucleus accumbens (Acb) function was investigated using feeding in rats as a model of motivation. Feeding encompasses processes associated with ‘appetite', ‘satiety' and ‘reward'. Distinct neurotransmitter systems in the Acb h…
The mood-as-input hypothesis predicts that perseveration at an open-ended task is determined by “stop rules” for the task and by the valency of the mood. Stop rules define a person's goals in task attainment, e.g. stopping after doing as much as they can, or stopping when they n…
Attentional biases arising from classical conditioning processes may contribute to the maintenance of drug addictions and anxiety disorders. This thesis examined whether attentional mechanisms for conditioned stimuli (CS) would be dominated by affective properties (Lang, Greenwa…
The metabotropic glutamate receptor, mGluR5, is densely expressed in brain regions involved in incentive learning processes. There is considerable evidence to suggest that following exposure to addictive drugs such as cocaine, adaptations in these brain areas may underlie the de…
This thesis presents a rat model, by which the effects of repeated ethanol withdrawal on withdrawal severity was investigated, in relation to the cognitive and behavioural deficits associated with repeated episodes of withdrawal. Repeated ethanol withdrawal in the rat has been w…
How a stimulus, such as an odour, is represented in the brain is one of the main questions in neuroscience. It is becoming clearer that information is encoded by a population of neurons, but, how the spiking activity of a population of neurons conveys this information is unknown…
A wealth of support has shown higher levels of state and trait impulsivity can be found among those individuals prone to developing problematic eating behaviors and obesity. Thus, upon commencing the investigations in this thesis, it was hypothesized that impulsivity is an indiv…
The following work presents an exploration of human search behaviour both from biological and computational perspectives. Search behaviour is defined as the movements made by an organism while attempting to find a resource. This work describes some of the principal procedures us…