Multiple perpetrator rape (MPR) has been the focus of relatively little empirical scrutiny, and the difficulty faced by the legal system in securing convictions (Horvath & Kelly, 2009). The primary aim of this thesis is to provide a meaningful exploration of interpersonal dynamics at work in MPR offences with a particular focus on those offences committed by two perpetrators (duos), the most commonly occurring type of MPR (DaSilva, Woodhams, & Harkins, 2012; Lambine, 2012). Better understanding has been sought here through the development of an exploratory offence progression model that attempts to synthesize two empirically supported offending theories: self-regulation and male peer support. Mixed methodological techniques were adopted, beginning with a quantitative study of police recorded MPR cases comparing duo, trio, and 4+ offending groups. This was followed by a qualitative study, focusing upon the possible role of male peer support in propagating atmospheres, dialogue, and behaviours conducive to misogyny and woman abuse, in a sample of sportsmen. Finally, incarcerated duo rapists were interviewed to gain perspective on the possibility of male peer support influencing their offending behaviours. Findings from thematic analyses of the qualitative studies suggest that interactions of certain all-male groups can result in an atmosphere of normalised misogyny that is an important contributor to individual acceptance of woman abuse, and in some cases, MPR in duo offending groups. The proposed model found some empirical support from study findings, and was elucidated and further refined in light of findings from each study, which are further elaborated in the context of reflexivity, limitations, and directions for the future.

Having worked as a psychologist in both the UK and Lima, Peru, working with patients who present a variety of conditions ranging from a depression to severe cases of schizophrenia, I became concerned by the way in which patients reacted to their diagnoses and in particular by the negative response of patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I also perceived that the lack of a clear and accepted diagnosis caused significant confusion regarding the condition for patients, carers and professionals. This led me to question the value of the diagnoses in the process of understanding and helping people with emotional distress or psychological problems. This study is a response to my experience and the experience participants expressed through me.

There is a lack of qualitative research demonstrating the emotional processes that entrepreneurs experience after they first start their businesses. This dissertation analyzed the emotional processes experienced by ten entrepreneurs during their venture’s start-up phase. A constructivist grounded theory research design was used to collect and analyze data in this investigation. Research findings showed entrepreneurs experienced simultaneous emotions that were of an intense nature during their early stages of business. These emotions included some combination of: excitement, anxiety/fear, disappointment, pressure/self-doubt, isolation, and relief. In addition, entrepreneurs identified entrepreneurial distress related to the constant need for action in their ventures and the use of technology, including cellular phones, email, and social media. Entrepreneurs described a gradual reduction in emotional intensity as they gained experience and learned how to cope. Coping behaviours used by entrepreneurs to counteract the overwhelming nature of emotions were: (a) developing improved entrepreneurial social networks, (b) gaining experience/learning from mistakes, and (c) changing their perspective on life as a whole. Coping behaviours aided in the reduction and fluctuation of entrepreneurial emotions.

Although there is a vast literature on motherhood, very little has been written from an existential perspective. The purpose of this study therefore was to explore the existential dimensions of the transition to motherhood. A phenomenological hermeneutic methodology was selected and Van Manen’s Lived Experience method was utilised. A sample of 8 first-time mothers, who had babies of between 6-12 months of age, were interviewed on their experience of becoming a mother. The analysis involved detecting themes by clustering together selected sections of the transcripts which referred to similar experiences or phenomenon. The following eight themes emerged from the analysis: 1. being with others, 2. developing a relationship with the baby, 3. living in time, 4. the unknown, 5. life is different, 6. challenging expectations, 7. motherhood identity and 8. difficult times. An existential analysis of these themes was then undertaken. The analysis showed that becoming a mother was a complex transition where mothers experienced challenges in all four dimensions of existence namely the physical, social, personal and spiritual dimensions. These changes affected their social relationships and the way they related to their babies and to others. The mothers also experienced changes in the way they related to their physical being and their temporality. There was also a change to the mothers’ sense of themselves. Becoming a mother also meant that the mothers’ values, beliefs and expectations were challenged. The findings also showed that motherhood was an ontological experience, where mothers became aware of aspects of their existence, such as their freedom, choice and responsibility and also their mortality.

One fifth of women in Britain reach the age of 45 without having children, yet psychological and developmental theories often begin with the assumption that all women become mothers. The aim of this study is to explore how the decade between 45 and 55 is experienced by women who have chosen non-motherhood. Ten voluntarily childfree women participated in semi-structured interviews, and the data produced were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Results indicate that the childfree choice is influenced by a gravitation towards meaningful areas of life other than motherhood, as well as a rejection of its perceived drawbacks. For these participants the decision to be childfree is mainly felt to be finalized within the 30s such that the biological end of fertility is not experienced as an ending of choice. The present decade is one of gladness about being childfree and appreciation of the freedom it affords, though there is some curiosity and wistfulness regarding what has not been chosen. For the majority of the participants the childfree choice is accepted by others, but there were also some experiences of stigma. Management of this is primarily through the creation of diverse social circles in which childfreedom is more the ‘norm’. Friendships are also viewed as important sources of support for a childfree future, which is itself perceived with some anxiety regarding old-age care. Recommendations are made for the professions of psychotherapy and counselling which include the ability to openly explore oscillating desires and ambivalence without believing in a ‘right’ choice, normalizing childfreedom, and helping clients to navigate the social world and plan ahead. It is suggested that further research into this topic and into the male experience of being childfree is needed.

The focus on blindness and partial sightedness and improving the lives of those living with blindness and partial sightedness has increased in UK public policy and discourse over the last decade. However, there has been little focus on the psychological and emotional needs of those living with sight loss and how emotional support services may work effectively with this client group. This investigation, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), examines the experience of nine blind or partially sighted people, aged between 22 and 75 years of age, living in the UK who have had psychological therapy with a sighted therapist in the last two years. The findings highlight various aspects of the participants’ experience under four meta-themes: 1) Struggles between the two worlds, 2) Bringing the ‘elephant’ into the therapy room, 3) Non-verbal communication and 4) Verbal communication and the power of the therapeutic relationship. The discussion highlighted areas for consideration for sighted counselling psychologists and other mental health professionals who may work with clients who are blind or partially sighted. It also explores three major areas: (i) for counselling psychology as a profession to consider how it supports clients who are blind or partially sighted, (ii) for sighted counselling psychologists and other mental health professionals to examine their own attitude toward disability and how they work with this in their profession and (iii) for sighted counselling psychologists to challenge traditional ways of working with touch, silence and talking when working with blind or partially sighted clients.

One of the greatest conundrums facing evolutionary biologists is how variation between individuals is maintained in situations where there is expected to be strong directional selection on an elaborate male trait. Sexual selection via female choice leads to the evolution of elaborate male traits, and consensus among females in their mate choice decisions can result in high reproductive skew. Such strong directional selection pressure may be expected to reduce genetic variation over time, yet high levels of inter-individual variation sustain such preferences. In this thesis I explored potential mechanisms that may maintain variation between individuals in one of the most unusual and exaggerated avian male traits; the bowers displayed by male spotted bowerbirds, Ptilonorhynchus maculatus. Choosy females exert strong selection pressure on males, yet males vary widely in their ability to exhibit a high quality display. My results showed that male bower owners were remarkably consistent in their display of decorations, a trait expected to experience a high level of fluctuation due to variation in the ecological and social environment. Given the range of factors that may introduce inconsistency, my results suggest that males actively maintain consistent displays, although I found no evidence for the adaptive benefits of doing so. I then explored three mechanisms that may be expected to maintain variation in bowerbird display. I found that attending the bower imposed physical costs on males, but these costs were only apparent in seasons of environmental stress. Males varied in their cognitive and problem-solving abilities, but I found no impact of higher cognitive performance on a male’s reproductive fitness. The final mechanism I tested was the impact of the social environment on male mating success. I found that males actively engage in marauding, a form of intrasexual competition targeting the bowers of rival males. Marauding was highly targeted and non-random within the population, and predominantly occurred between neighbouring bower owners. However, I was unable to determine what factors predicted these non-random interactions, and found no impact of the marauding rates experienced on male mating success. In the final part of this study, I looked at the novel occurrence of collaborative display between male bower owners and other non-bower-owning males. I found that these auxiliary males may gain delayed benefits from attending the bowers of experienced males, but was unable to determine what impact contributions from auxiliaries had on bower owning males and females attempting to assess them. I conclude by discussing the implications of my results for models of sexual selection.

Background: The neurobiological basis of human maternal behaviour has primarily been explored functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Structures including the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) orbitofrontal cortex/ventromedial prefrontal cortex (OFC/VMPFC) and amygdala are consistently and specifically activated in the maternal brain by infant-related stimuli and thought to be important for the experiences of pleasure and reward and the evaluation of emotional salience in response to a range of rewarding stimuli. Less is known about how these brain areas respond in mothers experiencing low mood or Postpartum Depression (PPD). Methods: During fMRI, mothers 3-9 months postpartum with a range of subclinical depressive symptoms completed a task involving the anticipation and receipt of monetary reward and a second task eliciting maternal reward using unknown infant faces. Participants completed general and postpartum-specific questionnaire measures of mood. Correlations were used to explore associations between neural responses to different rewarding stimuli in pre-determined regions of interest (ROIs). Results: When anticipating monetary reward compared to baseline, mothers higher in anhedonia and lower in trait positive affect showed relative deactivation in the right NAcc and amygdala. Exploratory analyses suggested that quicker reaction times (RTs) to distressed baby faces was associated with higher state positive affect and less activation in the right NAcc and bilateral amygdala in response to distressed baby compared to adult faces. Deactivation of the left NAcc was associated with higher postnatal depressive symptoms. Conclusions: Altered neural correlates of monetary reward anticipation may be a more sensitive marker of anhedonic depressive symptoms than reward outcome and thus should be assessed separately. Monetary reward paradigms might be less sensitive to mothering-specific depressive symptoms. Postnatal depressive symptoms may be linked to reward system recruitment but specifically in response to infant relative to adult distress.

The brain is constantly changing. Genetically specified developmental pathways interact with extrinsic factors including illness, injury and learning to shape the brain. This thesis presents two projects on experience dependent plasticity over different timescales. Exerting its effect across years, deafness provides a model of long term crossmodal plasticity. In the first part of this thesis I ask how deafness affects the thalamus. Diffusion weighted imaging was used to segment the thalamus and with probabilistic tractography, thalamo-cortical connections were traced. Microstructural properties of visual and frontal thalamic segmentations, thalamo-cortical tracts throughout the brain, apart from the temporal thalamo-cortical tract were altered. The neuroanatomical sequelae of deafness are evident throughout the brain. Deaf people have enhanced peripheral vision, facilitating a protective orienting mechanism when hearing cannot be relied upon. Widefield population receptive field (pRF) modeling with fMRI was completed to examine the functional and structural properties of primary visual cortex. Deaf participants had enlarged pRF profiles and thinner cortex in peripheral visual regions, again emphasizing plasticity across many years. In the second part I examine plasticity over the course of days. Visuomotor transformations translate visual input to motor actions, and its neural instantiation might change with training. We used a pattern component model on fMRI data to reveal a gradient of visual to motor information from occipital to parietal to motor cortex. Strikingly, we observed motor coding in visual cortex and visual coding in motor cortex. More tentatively, our results suggest that during sensorimotor skill learning there is decreased dependence on visual cortex as motor cortex learns the novel visuomotor mapping. In summary, I show crossmodal processing and plasticity in regions previously considered not to exhibit these properties, both in long- and short-term plasticity. This work emphasizes the contribution that computational neuroimaging can provide to the field of experience dependent plasticity.

This thesis aims to identify mechanisms underlying the impact of negative utility on probability estimates (Harris, Corner, & Hahn, 2009). In particular, we investigated evidence for arousal misattribution (Vosgerau, 2010) by examining a moderation by interoceptive ability. Furthermore, we investigated an account of loss function asymmetry (e.g., Weber, 1994) by examining the role of decision-control. Important to the current aims, social power is related to both interoception and control. Power increases interoceptive awareness (Moeini-Jazani, Knöpferle, de Molière, Gatti & Warlop, 2014) and one’s personal sense of control (Fast, Gruenfeld, Sivanathan, & Galinsky, 2009). Thus, we examined whether power moderates the relationship of negative utility and probability estimates. Furthermore, we aimed to observe whether this potential moderation by social power occurs due to the powerful’s greater interoceptive awareness, or due to their greater sense of control, supporting an account of arousal misattribution and loss function asymmetries, respectively. Chapter 2 provides some preliminary evidence that self-reported interoception moderates the impact of negative utility on probability across 2 experiments. However, when measuring interoceptive awareness objectively, no evidence for a moderating role was found. Furthermore, assessing arousal by means of galvanic skin responses provided also no evidence for arousal misattribution as a mechanism. Next, in Chapter 3 we examined Vosgerau’s (2010) original findings demonstrating arousal misattribution. Across 4 experiments, we are unable to replicate Vosgerau’s (2010) results. Subsequently, we investigated the role of loss function asymmetries in Chapter 4. Across 4 studies we provide evidence for the notion that powerful, but not powerless individuals assign higher probabilities to negative events. Manipulating the controllability of the event, we provide evidence for loss function asymmetries as a mechanism underlying the impact of social power on the relationship of negative utility and probability estimates. Having demonstrated that powerful individuals can be more sensitive to negative information, Chapter 5 shows across 3 experiments that the powerful act more on affordances of negative affective states. The powerful, who have been shown to be more approach oriented than the powerless (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003) become more avoidant under negative affective states than the powerless. In sum, this thesis provides evidence for loss function asymmetries underlying the interdependence of utility and probability, and demonstrates that power can lead to heightened sensitivity for negative (affective) information.