Univ., Diss--Lausanne, 2007.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Edinburgh, 1999.

Theses (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2009. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-103). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to accurately predict and reason about the mental states and beliefs of others, has yet to be explored in Emerging Adulthood, the 18-25 age range characterized by variability and developing a flexible worldview. The current study attempts to predict accuracy and response time on two ToM tasks, The Mind in the Eyes task (MiE), and the Empathetic Accuracy Paradigm (EAP) task by acting experience (whether the participant has acted in a live theater performance) and college experience (freshmen, sophomore, etc.) in 116 college participants. It was hypothesized that regression models including acting experience and college experience will account for more variance than models including only demographic variables and that the models including acting and college experience will significantly predict accuracy and response time on all ToM tasks. All such models predicting accuracy were significant, while only a model predicting response time on the EAP task was significantly predictive. It was hypothesized that acting experience will enable participants to use Theory of Mind skills faster and more accurately (Goldstein & Winner, 2012). Multiple regression analyses confirmed that acting experience is a significant predictor in all models predicting accuracy on Theory of Mind tasks, however response time was a significant predictor in only one of two tasks. It was also hypothesized that college experience will result in a more flexible worldview, open to multiple viewpoints and opinions, significantly influencing response time and accuracy. Multiple regression analyses revealed college experience approached significance in a model predicting accuracy on the MiE task, but no other significant contributions. Implications for the benefits of acting and college experience, the study of Theory of Mind in Emerging Adulthood, and practical applications of the findings in academia and therapeutic settings are discussed.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is often defined as “the ability to reason about mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, and to understand how mental states feature in everyday explanations and predictions of people’s behavior” (Apperly, 2012, p. 825). Recent research has introduced questions about performance on ToM tasks in emerging adulthood, a developmental period (ages 18-27) where exploration and identity formation occurs. The current study examined group differences between college students with acting experience, a population hypothesized to excel in ToM and empathy, and students without acting experience on cognitive and affective measures of ToM and empathy. The current study (N=162) used multiple tasks to measure ToM the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task (RME), Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), Faux Pas task (detection and belief subscales). All four subscales (perspective taking, fantasizing, empathic concern, personal distress) of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) was used to measure empathy. It was hypothesized that students with acting experience would perform significantly better than those without acting experience on all measures of ToM and empathy. It was also hypothesized that the way emerging adults process identity relevant information, as assessed by the Identity Style Inventory (ISI), would be related to ToM and empathy. Students with acting experience performed significantly better on the RME task and the belief subscale of the Faux Pas task. Better performance on the RME task and the belief subscale of the Faux pas task suggest advantages in emotion processing and belief reasoning for students with acting experience. No group differences were observed on the IRI. Informational processing style was positively related to all measures of ToM and all empathy measures except the personal distress subscale of the IRI. Normative and diffuse-avoidant identity processing style was negatively related to all measures of ToM and the personal distress subscale of the IRI. Normative identity processing style was negatively related to the fantasizing subscale of the IRI. The current study supports a relationship between identity processing style in emerging adulthood and measures of ToM and empathy. A factor analysis was conducted to examine relationships between ToM and empathy, finding no distinctions between affective and cognitive dimensions but a clear difference between ToM and empathy. Students with acting experience performed significantly better on the ToM factor but no other factors, supporting the previous analyses. Implications for further research, therapeutic interventions, and occupational training integrating acting experience are discussed.

D. Litt. et Phil. / Psychogenic infertility is both a medically and psychologically complex issue for women who have tried for several years to have a baby. Irrespective of etiology, infertility may be a very intense and stressful experience for both partners, affecting their relationship, sexuality, self-esteem, body image and identity. The ‘not knowing’ of psychogenic infertility creates uncertainty and anxiety, and may represent a crisis for many women. Conceiving and raising a child has social and cultural meaning that may precipitate a sense of loss about her female identity if she is not able to have a baby. The study’s exploration of psychogenic infertility entails four aspects: - an investigation of both the overt and covert attitudes of psychogenically infertile women towards dimensions of the feminine role, and an assessment of this quantitative analysis to determine which of the feminine role factors are significant - an analysis of the twenty-one case studies to investigate the life scripts of each woman and how these relate to: her femininity and her acceptance of her feminine role; her sense of motherhood and her motherliness; her own mother-daughter relationship; and to her psychogenic infertility. - a narrative exploration with one woman which incorporates these significant factors together with elements of her life scripts, using an integrated scripts, psychodynamic and narrative approach for the analysis - a storied account of the narrative exploration with one psychogenically infertile woman, in an effort to explore the relationship between femininity and life scripts in the psychogenesis of unexplained female infertility, and to investigate the possible therapeutic value of a therapeutic intervention for women experiencing unexplained infertility, specifically an intervention that would integrate: exploration of life scripts, psychodynamic understanding and narrative re-storying of her infertility. Therapeutic intervention for women experiencing infertility is often focused on the stress experienced and on cognitive-behavioural ways of living with the distress. Literature to date does not indicate a therapeutic framework based on an approach that integrates elements of life scripts, psychodynamic, and narrative therapies to explore how scripts about femininity and motherhood may be unknowingly preventing the women from identifying with her female role of conceiving a baby.

In recent years, much attention has been given to the question of whether content externalism is compatible with an account of self-knowledge maintaining that we have an epistemically privileged access to the content of our propositional mental states. Philosophers who maintain the two are incompatible (incompatibilists) have put forward two majors types of challenge, which I call - following Martin Davies - the Achievement and Consequence Problems, which aim to demonstrate that self-knowledge cannot be reconciled with externalism. These challenges have spawned a great deal of literature, and a diverse range of arguments and positions have emerged in response. In this dissertation, I intend to focus on examples of these different avenues of response, and show how none of them are adequate. In the first chapter, I lay the groundwork for the debate, setting up how externalism and self-knowledge are to be understood, and outlining both the incompatibilist challenges as well as the available responses to them. In the second chapter I examine these responses in more detail, concluding finally that the best available response is Tyler Burge's. Burge has two arguments that together establish his compatibilist position. First, he shows that even if externalism is true, our judgements about our occurrent thoughts are immunejrom error. This establishes that our judgements about our thoughts must be true. Second, he offers a transcendental argument for self-knowledge, arguing that our access to our mental states must be not only true, but non-accidentally true, in a way sufficient for genuine knowledge. This establishes that we possess the correct epistemic entitlement to our thoughts. In the third chapter, I argue Burge's arguments do not, in fact, give us good reason to suppose externalism and self-knowledge to be compatible. This, I argue, is because B urge relies upon a transcendental argument, which, in this context, cannot establish that we have self-knowledge if externalism is true. All it establishes, I argue, is that we do possess self-knowledge. And this is insufficient to establish that externalism and self-knowledge are compatible. / KMBT_363 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

Thesis advisor: Ellen Winner / Public polling and anecdotal evidence suggests that the general public greatly values music education. I argue that this is not because of content, discipline-specific skills like reading music notation or playing the trumpet, but because of the generalizable habits of mind, or broad thinking dispositions, that teachers teach in ensembles. Through analysis of systematic observation and interview data from multiple rehearsals of six band, choir and orchestra ensembles, eight Ensemble Habits of Mind emerged: Evaluate, Express, Imagine, Listen, Notice, Participate in Community, Persist, and Set Goals & Be Prepared. Using methodology similar to that of parallel work identifying Studio Habits of Mind in visual arts education (Hetland et al., 2013), this study shows many similarities between habits of mind in the two disciplines. However, two habits of mind that were specifically sought out in observations because they are frequently reported in advocacy arguments, Use Creativity and Recognize More than One Correct Answer, were not observed even under broad inclusion criteria. Suggestions are given for the practical application of these findings and discussion of how this framework can simultaneously support the good thinking happening in traditional large ensembles while bolstering rationale that informal music learning and other means of student-centered music making should be included in music programs in order to advance students’ creative thinking and tolerance for ambiguity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

No description available.

This thesis is a defense of the Content View on perceptual experience, of the idea that our perceptual experiences represent the world as being a certain way and so have representational content. Three main issues are addressed in this work. Firstly, I try to show that the Content View fits very well both with the logical behaviour of ordinary ascriptions of seeing-episodes and related experiential episodes, and with our pretheoretical intuitions about what perceiving and experiencing ultimately are: that preliminary analysis speaks for the prima facie plausibility of such a view. Secondly, I put forward a detailed account of perceptual episodes in semantic terms, by articulating and arguing for a specific version of the Content View. I provide arguments for the following theses: Perceptual content is two-layered so it involves an iconic level and a discrete or proto-propositional level (which roughly maps the seeing-as ascriptions in ordinary practices). Perceptual content is singular and object-dependent or de re, so it includes environmental objects as its semantic constituents. The phenomenal character of perceptual experience is co-determined by the represented properties together with the Mode (ex. Visual Mode), but not by the perceived objects: that is what I call an impure representationalism. Perceptual content is 'Russellian': it consists of worldly objects, properties and relations. Both perceptual content and phenomenal character are 'wide' or determined by environmental factors, thus there is no Fregean, narrow perceptual content. Thirdly, I show that such a version of the Content View can cope with the objections which are typically moved against the Content View as such by the advocates of (anti-intentionalist versions of) disjunctivism. I myself put forward a moderately disjunctivist version of the Content View, according to which perceptual relations (illusory or veridical) must be told apart from hallucinations as mental states of a different kind. Such a disjunctivism is 'moderate' insofar as it allows genuinely relational perceptual experiences and hallucinations to share a positive phenomenal character, contrary to what Radical Disjunctivism cum Naïve Realism holds. Showing that the Content View vindicates our pre-theoretical intuitions and does justice of our ordinary ascriptive practices, articulating a detailed and argued version of the Content View, and showing that such a version is not vulnerable to the standard objections recently moved to the Content View by the disjunctive part, all that can be considered as a big, multifaceted Argument for the Content View.