A considerable body of knowledge has emerged over recent decades revealing the developmental outcomes associated with the physical punishment of children. However, researchers have only just begun to investigate what children think about physical punishment. The present study explored children’s assessments of parents’ motives for using physical punishment, as well as its fairness, justness and outcomes. The findings indicate that while children think physical punishment can be effective, they do not think it is the best way to teach children or that it is necessary in order for them to learn. They also think it has negative emotional consequences for children and parents and that it is morally wrong. Surprisingly, there were few indications that children’s thinking about these dimensions changes with age. These findings have implications for parent education and raise interesting questions for future research.

Detection and choice research have largely focused on the effects of relative reinforcer frequencies or magnitudes. The effects of punishment have received much less attention. This thesis investigated the effects of punishment on human signal-detection performance using a number of different procedures. These included punisher frequency and magnitude variations, different types of punishers (point loss & time-outs), variations in stimulus disparity, and different detection tasks (judgments of stimulus arrays containing either more blue or red objects, or judgments of statements that were either true or false). It examined whether punishers have similar, but opposite, effects to reinforcers on detection performance, and whether the effects of punishment were successfully captured by existing models of punishment and choice. Experiment 1 varied the relative frequency or magnitude of time-out punishers for errors using the blue/red task. Participants were systematically biased away from the response alternative associated with the higher rate or magnitude of time-out punishers in two of three procedures. Experiment 2 varied the relative frequency of point-loss punishers using the blue/red task and the true/false task. Participants were systematically biased away from the alternative associated with the higher rate of point-loss punishers for the true/false task. Experiment 3 examined the effects of punishment on response bias from a psychophysical perspective. Previous detection research which varied stimulus discriminability while holding reinforcers ratios constant and unequal (Johnstone & Alsop, 2000; McCarthy & Davison, 1984) found that a criterion location measure (e.g., c, Green & Swets, 1966) was a better descriptor of isobias functions compared to a likelihood ratio measure (e.g., log β[G], Green & Swets, 1966). Experiment 3 varied stimulus discriminability while holding punisher ratios constant and unequal. Like previous research, isobias functions were consistent with a criterion location measure. Experiments 4, 5, 6, and 7 examined contemporary models of choice and punishment. Experiments 4, 5, and 6 varied the relative reinforcer ratio in detection tasks, both with and without the inclusion of an equal rate of punishment. Experiment 7 held the reinforcer ratio constant and unequal, and varied the durations of time-out punishers. Increases in preference (for the richer alternative) from reinforcer-only conditions to reinforcer + punisher conditions would support a subtractive model of punishment, while decreases in preference would support an additive model of punishment. Experiment 4 was a between-groups study using time-out punishers. It supported the predictions of an additive model. Experiment 5 used three different procedures in a preliminary within-subjects design, evaluating which procedure was best suited for a larger within-subjects experiment (Experiment 6). In Experiment 6, participants sat four reinforcer-only and four reinforcer + punisher conditions where reinforcers were point-gains and punishers were point-losses. The results from Experiment 6 were mixed - some participants showed increased preference while others showed little change or a slight decrease. This appeared related to the order in which participants received the reinforcer-only and reinforcer + punisher conditions. Experiment 7 also found no consistent change in preference with increases in time-out durations. Instead, there was a slow increase in bias on the richer alternative across the eight sessions. Overall, punishers had similar, but opposite, effects to reinforcers in detection procedures (Experiments 1, 2, & 3). These effects were successfully captured by Davison and Tustin�s (1978) model of detection. The later experiments did not provide support for a subtractive model punishment model of choice, which had provided the best descriptor in corresponding concurrent-schedule research. Instead, Experiment 4 supported an additive model, and Experiments 5, 6, and 7 provided no evidence for either model - limitations and implications of these studies are discussed. However, the present thesis illustrates that the signal detection procedure is promising for studying the combined effects of reinforcement and punishment, and may offer a worthwhile complement to standard concurrent-schedule choice procedures.

This thesis is about exile, but exile of a particular nature. I take the term exile discursively and textually, with no particular regard to historical specificities it may offer. In this sense I intend to use the concrete to render the abstract, working backwards from the historically and generally recognised condition of exile - the relegated, the diasporic - to its discursive relocation in various forms of narrative, reflection and representation. In this the measure of the exile will be the continuities re d discontinuities of the discourses of its location. The thesis will argue that the exilic subject - that is, the subject of modern consciousness - is the product of a certain fantasy formation of a subjective homeland projected onto the various margins of discourse, history and geography. This fantasy leads to a fascination and identification of things perceived at the margins or the bounds of a psychopathological homeland, rendering the homeland itself the site of alienation. The thesis argues against the positioning of the subject as alienated 'lack' in favour of a subjective and representative plenitude. The thesis will look to various discourses alienation and ideology, with a particular focus on the philosophy of reflection, phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory (the philosophy of the 'unreflected') to trace a sort of exilic affectability that inheres in the representation of the modern subject. The introductory chapter 'Parenthesis' picks at the relation between the discourses of post-structuralist and post-colonial theory, looking to their fascination with the margins and positing a certain intellectual and political tendency to fantasy. Chapters One and Two explore the problem of representation in these discourses with particular emphasis on the disposition of the subject and its relation to its own reading or metaphysical positioning, taking as its metaphor the representation: relation between the map and the territory. Chapters Three and Four look to the ontogenesis of the subject of exile and its reflective and metaphysical positioning in representation. Chapter Five closes the thesis with an exposition on the fantasy of subjective and representative closure. The fantasy of exile as the fantasy of closure proper.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis examines the lives of 142 convict men and boys who were assigned to the Tocal estate in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The study is based on a detailed reconstruction of their assignment and punishment records that were destroyed in the nineteenth century, complemented by other, personal information. The study tests the findings of previous, broader studies of New South Wales convicts against the data collected for the Tocal estate, develops an in-depth understanding of the day-to-day operation of the estate’s nearly all-convict workforce, and demonstrates how changes in policies of colonial convict administration impacted on the individual lives of Tocal’s convicts and on the estate itself. Case studies and micro-narratives reveal a picture of the lives of the convict men and boys assigned to Tocal and provide a window through which to glimpse their inner, personal worlds, to listen for the faint echoes of their voices and to appreciate their individual responses to their bondage, their heartbreaks and hopes, joys and fears, pleasures and pain as they served their time at Tocal. The thesis exposes the dynamics of assignment in action, explores convict working conditions, lifestyle and interaction with Aborigines at Tocal. It reveals the complex web of power relations between master and convict servants, the nature and extent of secondary punishment, the struggle for many to achieve emancipation and their fate once free. The level of local detail and analysis provided is uncommon among studies of convicts in New South Wales, enabling a closer examination of some of the more contentious and problematic claims of convict historiography, and in the process, partly supporting and partly disputing some revisionist interpretations. The thesis proposes that the complex and diverse individual experiences of Tocal's convicts are best understood, not by sweeping generalisations, but by a conceptual framework encompassing a series of dualisms or dichotomies that include paternalism and punishment, domination and resistance, deference and defiance, mateship and collaboration, trust and betrayal, freedoms and restraints, and cruelty and comfort.

Thesis (M.S.)--Villanova University, 2007. / Psychology Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A. (Hons.)), Department of Psychology, University of Adelaide, 1971.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Grace Theological Seminary, 1970. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-105).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität zu Münster, 1972. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 290-329).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--North Carolina State University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-80).

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 31-35).