Previous research into the psychological impact of miscarriage has taken a pathogenic approach, with limited research examining the factors that relate to enhanced psychological wellbeing. As a result, it is difficult to understand what predicts lower anxiety, depression and higher wellbeing. In order to address such gaps this study employed mixed methods, using a salutogenic perspective to investigate the effects of miscarriage on women's psychological wellbeing and to identify factors related to enhanced psychological wellbeing over time.

Unemploynent is a problem that confronts many western countries. The aim of this dissertation is to understand, on the basis of a phenomenological investigation, what it means to be an unemployed, white, South African citizen. These meanings are then seen and discussed against the background of the problems associated with the ideological structure within the country. How the latter relates to white employment and psychological life is also explored. The results demonstrate the negative impact unemploynent has upon the psychological functioning of the individual. The results further show the despair such individuals face, having been 'denied' an accepted role within society.

The aim of the study was to assess specific psychological aspects of the premenstrual syndrome, such as stress, attitudes towards menstruation, and past history of psychosomatic illnesses. Thirteen PMS subjects, were compared with 8 control subjects, who reported only minimal or no premenstrual symptoms. In comparison to controls, PMS subjects regarded menstruation as significantly more debilitating. No significant differences were found between the groups in levels of stress. However, the PMS group evidenced a significantly greater tendency to react to emotional stress, with overcontrol, i.e. the need to control and suppress emotions. In addition, the PMS group evidenced a significantly greater history of psychosomatic illnesses, than controls. Finally, there was a significant group reduction in symptom severity, within the PMS group, over the two month period of daily monitoring of symptoms. The results of this study suggest that certain psychological factors may be implicated in premenstrual symptom severity. / Psychology / M.A. (Social Science (Psychology))

Sleep quality is an aspect of sleep on which there is currently a lack of research and, in particular, there is little published data related to the quality of sleep obtained by athletes. Sleep quality is difficult to define because it includes quantitative aspects of sleep such as sleep duration, sleep latency and number of arousals as well as the subjective aspects such as ‘depth’ and ‘restfulness’ of sleep. Athletes require more sleep than the non-athlete population in order to recover from their exertions and, although evidence suggests that athletes are concerned about the impact that inadequate sleep has upon performance, there is a paucity of literature examining how poor sleep patterns affect the athletes’ psychological states during training and competition. Due to the scarcity of literature examining how the quality of sleep affects the psychological states of athletes, very little research has focused on athletes’ sleep and mood within the South African (SA) context. A quantitative research method with a combination of an exploratory and descriptive approach was employed. The sample of this study comprised of 87 athletes. The researcher made use of a purposive, non-randomized sampling technique. A self-report biographical questionnaire, the Profile of Mood States 2 – Adults (POMS 2), the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Adults (STAI-A) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) was administered once a week on the same day for the duration of 4 weeks. Descriptive and inferential statistics, Pearson R correlation and One-sample t-test were used to analyse the data. The researcher obtained the necessary authorisation to conduct the study and followed the ethical rules of conduct. Results indicated that there were certain relationships between the quality of sleep and mood states among athletes such as fatigue-inertia, anxiety (state and trait), depression-dejection, anger-hostility, vigour-activity and confusion-bewilderment. There was sufficient evidence to conclude that there was a significant between-week (week 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 3 and 4) difference in fatigue-inertia and sleep quality. Apart from differences in fatigue-inertia and sleep quality scores over the four weeks, all other results indicate a constant outcome over the four weeks for mood states and sleep quality. The results also indicated sufficient evidence to conclude that although there was evidence of a relationship between quality of sleep and mood states, it was not possible to make a definitive conclusion regarding whether sleep quality, anxiety, and depression were bi-directionally related. Despite some of the limitations to the study, the findings were thought to contribute in a valuable way to furthering knowledge regarding the quality of sleep and mood states among athletes. The current data suggest that monitoring athletes’ sleep and mood states may be a determining factor for satisfactory performance; therefore, the reasons for poor sleep quality should be identified in order to implement any coping strategies needed.

The study investigates .the use of the Bender Gestalt Test (BGT) amongst low-educated adults. Three versions of the BGT are used in this study; the original 'copy' version as well as the 'immediate' and 'delayed'recall versions. This is done so as to expand the ability of the BGT to identify neurological impairment and to differentiate between this and functional impairment. A literature review explores the problems of standardization in the administration, scoring and application of all three versions of the test Suggestions are made to correct the problems identified and a novel system of scoring the recall versions are proposed, which allows for the comparison of results of the three versions of the test and which is based on Lacks's (1984) and Weiss's (1970) systems. Administration procedures were also developed to suit the context of the study. The copy, immediate and delayed versions of the BGT were administered to a group of 184 low-educated adults. Statistical analyses revealed significant education effects for the sample tested with regards to both test scores and performance time. The finding of an education effect for performance time is discussed at length, as some literature regards excessive time as a neurological indicator. An anomaly for the group with no education was found to exist, with the scores of these subjects not Significantly different from those with 4-6 years of education. Possible reasons for this were explored. In addition, the findings of this research revealed a plateau effect with those having less than 6 years of education scoring substantially lower than those with 7 years and more. The scores of adults with 7 and more years of education level out with no significant differences between educational levels. This appears to suggest that education effects rather than the developmental maturity level proposed by Koppitz, are involved. In addition, the scores of low-educated adults on the expanded Bender Gestalt Test were significantly lower than those of children with similar educational levels, in other studies. These findings and possible explanations are discussed. The study concludes by suggesting new research areas and emphasizing the urgent need for separate normative data on the expanded BGT for low-educated adults, and the establishment of appropriate 'cut-off' points.

In traditional research approaches, soap opera viewing has been studied quantitatively. Such studies ignore the subjectivities, the sociocultural contexts, and life contexts of individual viewers. To account for such shortcomings and to offer a qualitative research approach, an investigation was conducted into the engagement that viewers have with a particular soap opera, The bold and the beautiful. The collective case study research method was used. Three subjects were interviewed using in-depth phenomenological interviewing and the data obtained was subjected to.a hermeneutic method of investigation. This involved using a reading guide that extracted firstly, how pleasure is experienced in soap opera viewing, and secondly how the viewers' interpretations of the soap opera are linked to their everyday life contexts. Pleasure was found to be related to experiencing the soap opera world as real, the social context of the viewer, the openness of the text, selecting textual elements, identification and opening up the viewer's world. The viewers' interpretations were related to their life contexts in terms of the meanings that were constructed around emotions, identities, interpersonal relations and a cultural interface. Most notable for the South African context, is that viewing The bold and the beautiful provides a cultural interface because African identities are brought to this practice.

M.Cur. (Midwifery and Neonatal Nursing) / The purpose of this study is to determine the experiences of the parents after the death of a congenital abnormal baby. Parents who have lost a baby go through a process of grief. This also applies to parents of a baby with congenital abnormalities. Parents whose congenital abnormal baby dies, not only grieve because of the abnormality of their baby, but also because it died Unstructured in-depth interviews were held with six couples within a year after the death of their babies. The experiences of the six couples were afterwards compared. A literature study was undertaken in order to determine what the conclusions of other researchers field were. The result of the literature study was compared with that of the present study. Recommendations are made at the end of this study on the practical applications, education and further research that can be undertaken on this subject.

M.A. (Psychology) / The purpose of this study was to determine whether psychological factors contribute to the rejection of a transplanted kidney. After a review of existing literature on the relationship between various psychological factors and immunological system of the body, it was hypothesized that psychological factors such as state- and trait anxiety, stress, locus of control as well as hopelessness would affect immune responses, and therefore contribute to the acceptance or rejection of a transplanted kidney. In order to test the hypothesis, patients of the Johannesburg Hospital undergoing haemodialysis and on the waiting list for kidney transplant were tested. Out of the initial sample, 12 of these patients, who had undergone a renal transplant, were used in the study. Out of the 12 patients, 6 patients had accepted the graft, while 6 patients had rejected the graft. The tests used in the study were the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Scale, Hopelessness Scale, Health Locus of Control and the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. The analysis of the data indicated a significant difference in the mean score for the two groups with relation to state anxiety, trait anxiety and health locus of control. The results indicated that the higher the state and trait anxiety, and the more internal the health locus of control of the patient, the greater the chances that the graft would be accepted. The results of this study indicated that psychological factors do contribute to the immune response of the body to a transplanted kidney. This would imply that more research is necessary to establish influence of various psychological as well as social variables in transplants and medical immunology.

The research reported here examines how a person's knowledge of the world is used in language recognition and production. Essentially it is concerned with the importance of a word's meaning as a factor in its recognition by a listener or reader and is its production by a speaker or writer. This area of research overlays with a great many areas in psychology, drawing upon research in attention, pattern recognition, memory, psycholinguistics and thought . It is necessary to give some working definitions of the terms used. The definition of semantic memory used here is that supplied by Tulving (1972, p 386): "Semantic memory is the memory necessary for the use of a language. It is a mental thesaurus, the organized knowledge a person possesses about words and other verbal symbols, their meanings and referents, about relations among them and about rules, formulas and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts and relations." The contents of semantic memory are typically what a person would say that he "knows" rather than what he "remembers". e . g. a person might say "I know canaries are yellow" whereas "I remember canaries are yellow" would not "sound right" to most native English speakers. This also illustrates an important property of semantic memory. The knowledge it contains is to a large extent common to members of a given culture. There will of course be individual differences but a sufficient body of knowledge will be shared in order to allow communication between persons. Retrieval from semantic memory is used here to refer to any process that involves making use of such stored knowledge. This may range from simply deciding that a particular sound pattern has occurred in speech before to verifying complex propositions. Context is restricted here to linguistic context. The question asked is how information provided by previous linguistic input affects processing of later input or output of language. The view of language comprehension taken here is similar to Goodman's (1967) approach to reading. This approach is described as follows: " ... Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perceptions and identification of all elements but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right first time. The ability to anticipate that which has not been seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening." (p 260) It is assumed here that a person's ability to anticipate is dependent upon the knowledge stored in semantic memory. The way this knowledge is used will in turn depend upon how it is organized. Since the Ancient Greeks the importance of organization in memory has been recognized but it is only relatively recently that psychologists have attempted to determine the principles underlying this organization. Since Quillian (1966) a number of models of how semantic memory is organized have been proposed. These will be discussed in the following sections. Many of the experiments reported here are concerned with what might be called "micro-context", that is how individual words, phrases and sentences affect recognition of incoming stimuli. Of course, the use of context goes far beyond the immediately preceding input but as yet there are no satisfactory theories, linguistic or psychological, that can deal with these wider aspects of language use. In fact there is still considerable disagreement over the processes involved in the recognition of single words, (see, for example, Rubenstein, Lewis and Rubenstein, 1971; Baron, 1973) . The approach taken to word recognition here is similar to Norman (1968) and Morton (1969). The notion which is central to both these authors and Goodman (see above) is the realization that no process can be analysed in isolation. The language system cannot decode the incoming sensory information without reference to stored knowledge. As Norman (1969, p 3) describes the role of memory, "it provides the information about the past necessary for proper understanding of the present". Thus context indicates to the memory system what knowledge is relevant to the analysis of the current input. To summarize this approach the information provided by context (immediate past) is referred to semantic memory (past) which in turn helps to produce the best guess as to the nature of the current sensory input (present) or even the nature of input which has not yet arrived (future) . The problem examined in this research is how the organizational structure of knowledge in semantic memory influences this guessing process . Whether such guessing is an active process as suggested by some investigators (e . g. Liberman, Stevens and Halle) or a passive process suggested by others (e . g. Morton, Treisman) will be discussed in a later section.

This study investigated family grief and resilience following a child’s death. Representing 23 families, 35 bereaved parents completed biographical questionnaires, the Family Hardiness Index, and the Family Attachment and Changeability Index 8. Significant positive correlations were found between family hardiness and family adaptation, and between parents’ age and family hardiness. Using grounded theory, interviews allowed for the formulation of categories including grief, continuing bonds, external support, religion, and family hardiness. The study reveals the need for exploring unique experiences of families bereaved by children’s deaths and identifies family hardiness as a potential resilience factor for this population