This review aims to explore social information processing styles, mentalisation abilities, and attachment security, and their associations, in relation to aggressive behaviours. These literatures are considered separately before possible relationships between these constructs are discussed. Existing theory and empirical findings around the relationships between social information processing, attachment and mentalisation are described. The author poses some further suggestions about how these constructs may be related, and the review ends with a possible model of the development of hostile attributional styles.

Emotional information is widely acknowledged to play a role in shaping human behavior. In particular, emotions, by modulating attentional capacity, provide an evolutionary advantage by facilitating quick responses to potential threat. By contrast, the impact of emotions on the decision-making processes is often seen as engendering suboptimal or even so-called "irrational" decisions In this thesis, I combine innovative experimental paradigms with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral pharmacological manipulations to explore how at neurobiological level these processes share similar mechanisms. In doing so, I aim to attempt a reconciliation of the aforementioned contrasting views on emotion. I examined four key aspects of interaction between emotion and both attention and decision-making: firstly, I investigated how the human brain is able to process emotional stimuli in conditions of limited attentional resources whilst subjects were engaged in an attentional blink paradigm. Secondly, using a similar paradigm and three different drug manipulations I examined the role of noradrenaline in modulating this process. Thirdly, I have studied how the human brain processes contextual emotional information when choice options are presented. Finally I extend my research to study how during economics transactions (in which the contextual emotional information is rooted in the subjects own role as either seller or buyer) an item's value representation in the brain affects the decision process.

The current thesis identifies inconsistencies and contradictions within the literature regarding guilt. One approach considers guilt to be a prosocial emotion that motivates individuals to maintain social halmony. The other approach considers guilt to be egoistic by nature, and motivates individuals to make themselves feel better. This thesis identifies these approaches as the SoCial Guilt Model (SGM) and the Individual Guilt Model (IGM) respectively. The Cognitive-Affect Guilt Explanation (CAGE) proposed by this thesis is founded upon three core assumptions: (i) that guilty feelings differ f):om guilty thoughts (the "CAGE distinction"), (ii) that guilty feelings primarily motivate impulsiveness, and (iii) that guilty thoughts primarily motivate prosocial behaviours. Experiment 1 indicated that guilty feelings were a significant predictor of self-indulgence whereas guilty thoughts were not. Experiment 2 supported all three core assumptions of CAGE. Guilty thoughts predicted pro social behaviour, while guilty feelings predicted impulsiveness at the expense of long-telm gain. Experiment 3 replicated the association between guilty feelings and impulsiveness but failed to replicate the association between guilty thoughts and pro social behaviour. Experiment 4 showcased the ability of CAGE to predict behaviours in a dynamic and complex environment, involving multiple guilt behaviours (reparation, self-punishment). Experiment 5 was conducted to investigate the neural correlates of the CAGE distinction. The results supported the CAGE distinction based upon activity of limbic and social cognition structures. The theoretical and practical implications of the proposed model are discussed. The original contribution to lmowledge of the present research is how an understanding of the CAGE distinction can benefit psychologists in predicting the types of behaviour associated with guilt.

Previous research has provided evidence linking individuals' psychological traits to their ability to perceive, interpret and respond to facial expressions of emotion (i.e. the emotion decoding process). These 'trait-decoding links' have been established by testing the relationships between participants' personality and emotional intelligence (EI), and their performance in emotional expression-judgment/labelling tasks. However, recent research challenging the core concepts of these methods calls into question the ecological validity of established trait-decoding links. The present research consisted of four studies, each representing an iterative attempt to address the aim of this thesis: re-evaluating the reliability of previously established trait-decoding ability relationships, with decoding tasks that use dynamic, spontaneously elicited emotional-expressions as stimuli. Across each study, an emotion-tracing task was used to measure participants' continuous ratings of spontaneously elicited emotional-expressions (focusing on expression intensity), portrayed in a series of short video-clips. The analyses focused on establishing how the reliability, average intensity and variation of these ratings related to psychological traits, and other measures of decoding ability. Initially, the results provided tentative evidence for the validity of the emotion-tracing task as a measure of decoding ability (Study 1). However, a subsequent inability to replicate these results using an improved and expanded methodology (Study 2), prompted an investigation exploring why more conventional measures of decoding ability appeared to more reliably replicate trait-decoding links, compared to the trace-based · methodologies (Studies 3 and 4). The results indicated that the likelihood of finding trait-decoding relationships may be higher when using posed expressions of emotion as experimental stimuli. It is argued that the spontaneously elicited expressions used in the emotion-tracing tasks were less likely to engage the attention-based processes that underpin trait-decoding links. These findings suggest previous research has overestimated the validity of psychological traits as predictors of how effectively individuals can decode human emotion in day-to-day interactions.

Expressed emotion (EE) represents a measure of the emotional quality of the relationship between a key caregiver and relative, where the latter is experiencing a psychiatric or medical condition, and with implications for the course of this condition. To the author's knowledge, despite the salience of behavioural disturbance for families with learning disabled children, no published study has specifically investigated the relationship between parental EE and child behavioural disturbance. The current study focused on a comparison of high and low EE households with regards to child behavioural disturbance, parental stress and coping, and service and respite care usage. Forty parents were interviewed with a modified Camberwell Family Interview. The results showed no significant difference between high and low EE groups with regards to child behavioural disturbance, parental coping as related to factors such as social support and familial resources, and service and respite care usage. High EE parents reported significantly higher levels of stress and significantly less use of support and advice outside the family system than low EE parents. The findings conflict with conclusions from EE research e.g . with learning disabled adolescents, dementia and non-learning disabled children, which have demonstrated a relationship between EE and behavioural disturbance, but concur with studies, mainly with regards to schizophrenia, which have found that level of EE is independent of behavioural disturbance. Thus level of EE in the current study appears principally to reflect parental characteristics as opposed to child-related characteristics. The results suggest that a focus on parental psychological needs in relation to both the emotional quality of the parent-child relationship, and the care of the child more generally, might be more appropriate for both parents and children, as opposed to a traditional child-centric service delivery . Further research is required to elucidate the relationship between EE and behaviour, and there is value in exploring the relationship between EE and behaviour over time, within a longitudinal design. Indeed, the scope for further study of EE in the area of learning disability is tremendous, and the inherent modifiability of the EE construct renders it an appealing guide in terms of service development and outcome evaluation.

Though boredom is considered a universal experience "there is no agreed definition or well-developed instrument for measuring it, and there is no comprehensive theory of its causes" (Fisher 1993). Nevertheless the bored are thought to have worse work records, more accidents, higher absenteeism, and to show a host of unfortunate behaviours from delinquency to substance abuse. This research shows the existing literature of boredom to be inconsistent or inconclusive. Field observation of boring and repetitive work suggested a new model of the behaviours that are thought to be boredom related. In this model, requisite mental resource allocation is assumed to progressively decrease as a task becomes more and more familiar. Natural inertia in the allocation system results in temporary misalignments between allocated resource and task-demand. It is these misalignments that cause boredtype behaviour. The awareness of these misalignments may register as felt-boredom. The predictions of this Inertial Resource Allocation Model (IRAM) were tested in a series of experiments. It was shown that misallocation of mental resource can be reliably measured, that it is individually variable, and that it does indeed predict behaviours, notably work quality and absence, that are considered boredom sensitive. Misallocation of mental resource is proposed as a sufficient condition for inducing 'boredtype behaviour'. However, though necessary, it is not sufficient, to induce 'felt-boredom'. The same mismatch may be interpreted differently in other contexts. The conclusion is that boredom is too vague a notion to be useful to Psychology. However, a measurable and operationally defined feature of mental functioning -- mental inertia -- can explain all the phenomena once associated with the idea of boredom.

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