The main aim of this thesis is to understand how people use cognition to resist tempting objects, and behaviours. Applying the Epistemic and Teleologic Model of Deliberate Self-Persuasion to temptation, the impact of motivation on the use of self- persuasion strategies was explored. Four experimental studies were conducted in three diverse contexts: teenagers' consumption of beverages, restrained eaters' consumption of chocolate, and dating students' attraction to alternative partners. Overall, the pattern of results indicated that motivated people use epistemic self- persuasion strategies to derogate the tempting object as a way to resist temptation. This process of deliberate self-persuasion had effects on subsequent evaluation and behaviour towards the tempting object, in particular by the creation of new negative information regarding that object. Discussion focuses on relevant theoretical and practical implications in the domains of attitude-change, cognitive therapy, and social intervention.

This thesis looks at the mental stores created in reading real, full, narratives. It concentrates on how we utilise these stores when interpreting pronouns and other reference items. Initially we work within a traditional anaphoric framework, seeing how far this can account for how a reader establishes a link between pronoun and antecedent in real text. Character constructs, equivalent to Brown and Yule's mental representations, are later built into the model and the role of the antecedent is reconsidered. It is then argued that to understand reference in narrative we need to consider how narrative is structured. This leads us to postulate the frame, a contextual construct which monitors which characters are together in which place at what time. Contextual information is rarely specified fully in any one sentence but an awareness of it is essential for an understanding of the action. We consider how we may modify frames, switch from one frame to another and reactivate earlier frames. The frame is first used to explain examples where there is no antecedent in the near environment of a pronoun. It is then built into a model of reference which is anticipatory rather than anaphoric. The frame also leads us to consider the nature of character constructs and to postulate narrative enactors. Finally we draw a distinction between framed text and unframed text, arguing that this distinction is necessary to understand how a reader interprets reference items in real narrative examples.

Executive cognitive processes and emotion cue processing was explored in introvertive anhedonia, the O-LIFE’s negative schizotypal trait dimension, with the aim of identifying endophenotypes. The experimental work of the thesis was conducted in three distinct parts. The first two used reaction time tasks of selective attention to examine 1) the possibility of a general abnormality in executive cognitive functioning, and 2) the possibility of an emotion cue processing abnormality. Results from these two parts informed the development of the final experiment that used procedures adapted from animal associative learning to examine the interaction between executive cognitive processes and the processing of positive and negative emotional cues in 1) the learning of differentially reinforced biconditional discrimination and 2) the sensitivity to changes in the emotional valence of outcomes. Two experiments, presented in Chapter 2, established that introvertive anhedonia was associated with an executive functioning deficit that could be characterised as a deficiency in processing context. Chapter 3 presented a further three experiments indicating that introvertive anhedonia had blunted processing of negative and positive emotional cues, but under certain specific conditions a bias to the processing of negative stimuli. The final experiment, presented in Chapter 4, found that introvertive anhedonia was behaviourally insensitive to outcome valence changes of stimulus-outcome associations. The blunted processing of valenced stimuli seems to have influenced executive cognitive processes involved in both detecting the changes in outcome valence of associations and in forming new associations. An inability in introvertive anhedonia to adjust behaviour to changes in outcome valence might lead to perseveration, inappropriate responding and, in some situations, an over-exposure to aversive stimuli. The executive cognitive deficits observed in section two, and the emotion cue processing deficits observed in section three might therefore result form failures in common mechanisms.

“A picture speaks a thousand words”, yet retrieval of a specific, previously viewed image from a large image collection may result in a substantial number of unwanted returns. This thesis offers an investigation into the feasibility of a novel solution to the retrieval of pictures. Rather than offering an alternative to current image retrieval strategies, research presented examines whether a novel approach, grounded in human cognition, can have specific benefits within specific contexts. The HELM analytical model (Lansdale, 1998) was adapted to 8 experiments observing location memory for everyday pictures. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated some of the earlier work conducted by Lansdale, Oliff & Baguley (2005), and examined memory for location in a novel set of real-world images. Experiment 3 looked at the impact of image content on the distribution of errors in recall. Experiment 4 examined the effect of threat-victim relationships between objects on memory for location. Experiments 5 and 6 were concerned with the effects of object density within a scene. And Experiments 7 and 8 examined the effects of forgetting of spatial memories over periods of recall delay. Data from these experiments demonstrated that memory for location in complex real-world images is prone to two types of error, near-miss errors which fall at locations neighbouring the target location, and far-miss errors which fall at locations distant to the correct location value. The presence of threat within an image resulted in participants foreshortening the estimation of space between two objects. Recall was shown to be more accurate for single-object over multiple-object images. And forgetting can be characterised as both a loss of the availability of location information in memory, and a spread of the distribution of error in recall. Findings are discussed in terms of the applied consequences for the design of query languages for image retrieval.

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The present doctoral thesis addresses the issue of the relation in human cognition between language and thinking, and, more specifically, it aims to investigate by scientific means the potential for a language-particular influence on cognitive activity and putative reflexes, i.e. the linguistic relativity question (cf. Whorf 1956, Lucy 1992a).To this end, the present thesis offers a detailed exploration of linguistic relativity and of its potential scope of validity - at least in theoretical terms. It further situates its study within modern cognitive science, whose epistemological approach to the study of the mind is multi- disciplinary, bringing the fields of psychology, linguistics and philosophy together for the enhanced pursuit of an understanding of human cognition. Having established a conducive framework for the study of linguistic relativity within cognitive science and linguistics, the thesis offers to focus on a specific experiential domain of human life, and on its variable encoding in different languages to seek specific language influences over the conceptualisation of that domain. The chosen domain consists of MOTION - a pervasive domain in humans' daily lives and daily needs of expression. This domain is particularly interesting to relativistic studies as its conceptual components are lexicalised via differing means across the world's languages. Existing typologies for motion encoding (e.g. Talmy 1985) have established at least two main possible patterns, also known as verb- and satellite-framing, and as exemplified by the French and English languages respectively. The essential difference between the two language types consists of their grammatical encoding of the core element of motion, namely PATH - either in a verb or in a verbal satellite ― and of their selective encoding of peripheral elements, such as MANNER of displacement - with this element being optional in French grammar, and obligatory in English. The thesis offers empirical linguistic data to confirm - and also challenge - the fixedness of the patterns identified by e.g. Talmy. A thorough discussion of the linguistic framing of motion is presented, together with experiments bearing on the cognitive reality of motion conceptualisation - independently of language. This thesis thus contributes to an understanding of motion both in language and in cognition. Finally, it offers experimental work bearing on the relativity question, i.e. exploring whether linguistic patterns for motion encoding exert a decisive influence on the non-linguistic conceptualisation of motion, resulting in the two language communities differing in their cognitive appreciation of otherwise similar motion events. The final results offer evidence in favour of differing conceptualisations, that is, in support of linguistic relativity.