To what extent is the tendency to act more prosocially towards ingroup than outgroup members a 'default' tendency that is based on intuitive processes activated across different social contexts and with different social groups? Here I report three sets of targeted empirical studies that use economic games to explore ingroup favouritism in prosocial behaviour. In Chapter 2, I use a newly developed measure to explore whether simply categorizing people into groups is sufficient to induce ingroup favouritism in both gains and losses frames. I find that minimal groups are significantly more prosocial to ingroup members than outgroup members, regardless of the economic cost of helping, whether decisions were public or private, and whether the decision is framed in terms of gains and losses. In Chapter 3 I apply dual-process models to intergroup prosocial behaviour and show that even under time pressure without the potential to deliberate, participants cooperate more with minimal ingroup than outgroup members in both gains and losses frames. In Chapter 4, I explore ingroup favouritism in the context of real religious groups using games that either have (Trust Game) or lack (Dictator Game) interdependent outcomes. I find ingroup favouritism only by atheist participants in a Dictator Game. In both games, Christian participants transferred more to both Christian and atheist recipients, and this was driven by the frequency of thinking about religious ideas. Together, my results support the thesis that ingroup favouritism is a default, intuitive, tendency robust across different contexts and even with novel groups, and charts a course for future research.

Most affect research has focused on "actual affect", with relatively limited consideration given to "ideal affect", that is the states that people value and would ideally like to feel (Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006). The present research investigated sources of variation in ideal affect, particularly focusing on cultural and context-dependent factors that shape affective preferences. Studies 1 and 2 focused on cultural variations in ideal affect, whereas Studies 3, 4 and 5 focused on sources of variation in context-dependent ideal affect. In Studies 1 and 2, I investigated affective preferences in Brazil, Greece Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Zambia. Results demonstrated an effect of cultural variables on ideal affect. Specifically, ideal high arousal positive (HAP) states were predicted by independent self-construal and influence goals, consistent with previous research. Extending previous work, results also found that power distance and beliefs about emotional expression independently predicted ideal HAP. Ideal low arousal positive affect (LAP) was predicted by interdependent self-construal in line with prior findings. Uncertainty avoidance was also an independent predictor of ideal LAP. In investigating context-dependent ideal affect, I focused on assessing whether an influence target's characteristics in an interpersonal persuasion context would affect ideal affect. In Study 3, results demonstrated that knowledge of an influence target's motivational orientation had an effect on preferences for LAP. However, this effect was not replicated in Studies 4 or 5. Overall, these 5 studies found some support for previous factors that have been identified in shaping ideal affect, while identifying additional sources of cultural variation and pointing to the possibility that another person may influence affective preferences in an interpersonal situation.

This thesis considers how a situational context may influence empathy and mental state recognition. It explores if and how interventions drawing on empathy can be of practical use in preventing or reducing violent offending behaviour, and addresses the limitations of trait approaches which have hindered previous research and practice within the field. An exploratory, multi-modal design facilitated analysis of data from multiple forensic settings, including: two focus groups with practitioners and researchers; six interviews with young violent offenders; and 290 items of archival data collated from a prison-based victim awareness programme (including a sub-set of violent offender narratives). Contrasting epistemological approaches were drawn on pragmatically at different stages, including: thematic analysis (critical realist perspective) and discursive psychology (social constructionist/relativist perspective). Findings revealed the influence of situated context on social norms and expectations of behaviour; for example, individuals followed in-group values even if this meant not helping an individual in distress. Analysing the social construction of empathy during victim awareness interventions revealed how violent offenders use sophisticated techniques to demonstrate ‘doing victim awareness’, whilst justifying or minimising violence, victim blaming, or diminishing the character of the victim. Familial victims or the offenders themselves were most recognised as the people harmed by an offender’s criminal behaviour; whereas the direct victims of crime were the least recognised. More broadly, analysis revealed socially normative reasons not to empathise in some circumstances. Finally, ‘resilience’ discourses produced by surrogate victims during interventions, helped resolve offenders’ past harms and supported narratives of desistance. In conclusion, victim awareness interventions hold a valuable role in helping offenders work towards a crime free life; however, changes are needed to develop the efficacy of these programmes. Interventions could focus on enhancing reasons to offer empathy and helping behaviour, while challenging justifications for withholding empathy to others. Wider social change challenging the social norms of sub-cultural peer groups is also important when reducing violence and promoting empathy.

Many real-world tasks involve interacting with a range of electronic visual displays. Maintaining rapid and accurate performance on such tasks may be difficult due to situational stress, time-pressure, and an awareness of high error-costs. In a typical visual search, relevant target items must be identified amongst irrelevant distractors, but in a dynamic display all of these stimuli may undergo change. Much of the literature on visual search and monitoring examines static arrays and scenes, but dynamic displays present a more complex problem that involves greater demands on sustained attention and higher levels of both spatial and temporal uncertainty. The present thesis investigates visual search and monitoring using a novel dynamic search task and examines some of the individual factors that influence performance on this task. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction and review of the literature on visual search, relevant individual factors and two potentially beneficial interventions. Chapter 2 introduces and characterises a novel dynamic search task and, across three experiments, demonstrates predictive monitoring and the importance of individual differences in verbal working memory capacity and intolerance of uncertainty in accounting for variation in search performance. Chapter 3 shows that working memory training and transcranial direct current stimulation were not effective in improving search performance, but does reveal that target prevalence influenced target detection, predictive monitoring and the relationship between intolerance of uncertainty and search performance. Chapter 4 demonstrates similarities in the monitoring of colour and numerical information and shows that the need to search for a second category of target can have a negative impact on search performance and predictive monitoring. Finally, Chapter 5 summarises the findings from the empirical work in the preceding chapters and identifies a number of important theoretical and practical implications. Further work should continue to examine the contribution of individual variation in cognitive, personality and psychopathological traits to performance in complex visual tasks.

Conduct Disorder (CD) is characterised by a persistent and pervasive pattern of aggressive and antisocial behaviour that violates the rights of others or in which major age-appropriate societal norms are violated. Researchers have argued that this pattern of sensation-seeking behaviour stems from a higher threshold for emotional stimulation in children and adolescents with CD compared to typically-developing individuals. In addition, studies have found a reduced sensitivity to reward which interferes with the learning of appropriate behaviours. CD and AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are considered to be highly comorbid both in clinical and community samples. Research has indicated that individuals with CD+ADHD have poor social functioning, poor socio-economic outcomes later in life and are likely to drop-out or be kicked out of educational institutions. However, neuroscience research has not properly addressed the issues surrounding the effects of comorbid ADHD on cognitive and emotional processing in CD. Understanding these effects will allow us to develop more sophisticated causal pathways, which in the longer term may aid clinicians to administer treatments tailored specifically to patients’ individual needs. The present study investigated the effects of comorbid ADHD on the clinical and neuropsychological profiles of adolescents with CD, by comparing groups of adolescents with CD-only (CD-ADHD; n = 23), comorbid CD+ADHD (n = 28) and a typically-developing control group (TDC; n = 30). We used a range of clinical and questionnaire-based assessments, as well as a series of behavioural tasks that examined Executive Functions (EFs), facial emotion recognition and perspective-taking. We found that CD was independently associated with impairments in impulsive choice (“hot” EFs), whereas comorbid ADHD was associated with impairments in interference control and working memory (“cool” EFs). Furthermore, we found that a broad pattern of facial emotion recognition deficits was limited to those individuals with CD+ADHD. Our study was also the first study to explicitly investigate the impact of comorbid ADHD on perspective-taking in CD. Our results do not provide evidence for a deficit in perspective-taking in adolescents with CD, regardless of ADHD comorbidity. Considered together, these results provide some insight on the impact of ADHD on the neuropsychology of CD and can be useful to both researchers and clinicians when considering new research designs and clinical interventions.

This thesis examines how and when infants learn colour words, and how the knowledge of colour words affects their comprehension of colour categories. Over the course of seven experimental chapters, the ability of infants and toddlers to learn colour words, use colour words to process colours, and the role that colour words play in learning to perceive colour are all assessed. Chapters 2 and 3 assess claims that colour words are learned late using parental report and eye-tracking methods, finding that colour words are learned as early as 19 months. In contrast to this, Chapter 4 demonstrates that toddlers do not learn to modify colour words as dark or light until much later. Chapter 5 demonstrates that colour words are a crucial component for processing the colours of objects, showing that infants do not look to a colour-matched object unless they comprehend the colour word. Chapters 6 and 7 employ novel paradigms to explore categorical processing of colour, finding that infants have a preference for within-category colours, but that this has no effect on their attention to dynamic coloured stimuli. In Chapter 8, a prototype for an infant colour vision test is shown, demonstrating that the second year of life is crucial for development of visual closure. The generalisability of these results to infant perception and word learning is also discussed.

It has previously been suggested that a bounded adjective (e.g., dead) must be interpreted as its antonym (e.g., alive) when negated (e.g., not dead), in contrast, unbounded entities (e.g., wide) when negated, an unbounded entity (e.g., not wide) can refer to multiple states and is not necessarily interpreted as its antonym (e.g., narrow). How readers interpret such expressions is largely unknown. Accordingly, the research within this thesis investigated the processing of boundedness in four experiments. Experiment 1a-c used off-line judgment tasks to assess whether readers were sensitive to boundedness when judging negated sentences. These showed readers judged bounded negation as similar to its antonym, whereas unbounded negation is seen as being less similar than their antonym. Experiment 2 used eye movements to investigate on-line processing of boundedness. Experiment 3 examined the influence of bounded on the facilitatory effect of connectives on establishing discourse coherence. Experiment 4 investigated the specificity of representations of bounded and unbounded negation. By measuring eye movements, we can gain insights into the on-going cognitive processing that is occurring during the reading of text. Eye movements have been used extensively to help us to understand the cognitive processing that occurs during reading, but there has been very little research into how our reading differs when we read bounded and unbounded negation. In this thesis the influences of boundedness on reading is examined. Bounded items appear to be interpreted as categorical, whereas unbounded items are interpreted in a more ambiguous manner. These experiments are the first to provide evidence that boundedness has an early influence on the online processing of negation during natural reading.

In this thesis, I report studies investigating the neurobiology of conduct disorder (CD) – a disorder diagnosed in children and adolescents who display a persistent pattern of disruptive and aggressive behaviour. My particular focus is on the role of frontal, limbic and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis systems, and especially whether CD-related alterations in these systems differ between males and females. A range of different imaging techniques were applied to data from the Neurobiological and Treatment of Adolescent Female Conduct Disorder study (Fem-NAT-CD). In study 1 (Chapter 4), we employed surface-based morphometry techniques to assess frontal and limbic (cortical and subcortical) brain structures. Similar patterns of CD-related related reductions in cortical volume, thickness, and surface area in the superior frontal gyrus were seen in both sexes. The second study (Chapter 5) assessed the shape of subcortical limbic structures. Youths with CD exhibited shape deformations (i.e., inward) in the shell of the nucleus accumbens compared to controls, independent of sex. The third study (Chapter 6) used spherical deconvolution basedtractography and virtually dissected key fronto-limbic white matter tracts, namely: the uncinate fasciculus, fornix, and the subgenual, retrosplenial and parahippocampal bundles of the cingulum. We observed reduced fractional anisotropy in the retrosplenial cingulum in the CD group relative to healthy controls. However, this result was moderated by sex: males with CD showed reduced, while females with CD showed increased fractional anisotropy compared to sex-matched healthy controls. Finally, we investigated sex differences in HPA axis function (Chapter 7) by measuring cortisol response during the Trier Social Stress Test for Children. Both males and females with CD showed blunted cortisol response to stress, and such effects were not explained by low levels of self-rated fear or anxiety. In a small, proof of concept analysis we observed a positive correlation between cortical volume of the superior frontal gyrus and cortisol reactivity. I conclude that the neurobiological basis of CD is relatively similar in males and females. Thus, previous findings in males with CD may also apply for females with CD. Suggestions for future research are presented and clinical implications are discussed.

In this research, I have explored the retirement experience of 6 humanitarians who had retired from a humanitarian organization after a career characterised by frequent, global relocation and the need to live and work in physically and emotionally challenging conditions. I used a narrative methodology which viewed their written stories and conversations with me as situated in specific organizational, social and cultural contexts. I have also identified themes which arose in their narrative in the three areas of enquiry which has framed this research: finding meaning and identity in retirement, the importance of relationships in retirement and dealing with existential questions. The issue was becoming more relevant to the organization because of changes in the mandatory retirement age which are currently being implemented and the implications of this for individuals themselves, their decision making and the options for providing organizational support in the years prior to a later retirement. Each of the retiree’s stories was as unique as the person who wrote it but nevertheless interesting conclusions were drawn which may be relevant for others: the inner, emotional journey of retirement can be as important and eventful as the exterior, practical journey. This group of men and women may be on the vanguard of globalization in that they assimilate at a deep level into their identities the idea of global citizenship during retirement. The organizational career management of humanitarians towards the end of their careers needs to reflect to a greater extent the challenges they have faced during their careers and those they will continue to face in retirement.

We inescapably experience the world through our body. Yet as our embodiment itself is the background of all our everyday experience, it appears to be experienced quietly. We tend to take for granted that our body is present in and contributing to all experience, as we also tend to take for granted the feeling that it belongs to us and it is under our control. However, certain neuropsychological disorders that arise after damage to the right hemisphere of the brain serve as a reminder that these feelings and intuitions cannot always be taken for granted. What is more 'counter-intuitive' than someone who is unaware of the fact that they can no longer move half their body? Or someone who cannot recognise their own arm or, leg as theirs? These disorders have troubled neurology, philosophy and psychology since the time of Charcot, Janet, Freud and Babinski and continue to represent frequent, largely unmet and poorly studied clinical challenges. The present thesis aims to explore from an interdisciplinary vantage point the way in which the body is experienced in people with such neuropsychological disorders following a stroke. More specifically, it aims to complement current scientific perspectives on these disorders with existential-phenomenological ideas regarding the experience of embodiment in these patients, with particular emphasis on the 'pre-reflected' dimensions of embodiment and their derivatives in mental life as highlighted by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty. The empirical part of the thesis involves behavioural and neuroimaging methodologies from the field of neuropsychology, including two case series and one single case study (total N = 14). Three hypotheses inspired by the early writings of Merleau-Ponty on embodiment were explored in these three studies, respectively: (a) whether patients with motor unawareness have a 'pre-reflective' awareness of their deficits; (b) whether such forms of pre-reflective awareness may paradoxically contribute to their explicit unawareness and (c) whether insights generated by the above two studies could be translated to a psychophysical intervention that can help a patient recover her explicit awareness of her paralysis. The results of these studies confirmed all three hypotheses, with some theoretical constraints that are discussed in each chapter. More generally, the results of these studies are discussed in relation to both scientific and philosophical theories of body awareness and most importantly in relation to clinical challenges and the scope of existential counselling psychology. I argue that these disorders allow a unique insight into how existential, counselling and psychotherapeutic psychology can position its practice in relation to some of these paradoxical ways of being-in-the-world that are not habitually so 'visible', unless revealed by brain damage. These considerations apply particularly to the more general paradox of psychotherapeutic clients who frequently come to therapy consciously hoping to change their habitual ways of being-in-the-world while implicitly, yet with almost equal force, they may hope not to change their commitment to the world.