This study investigated whether attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance are significant predictors of coping strategies in relation to memories of coping with partner infidelity. Four hundred and fifteen participants who had the experience of a romantic partner engaging in infidelity completed questionnaires measuring their attachment style and their use of eight cognitive and behavioural coping strategies. Of the total participants, 231 who had completed all of the study’s measures and met the research inclusion criteria were included within the preliminary and main analyses. The data was analysed using a series of separate hierarchical multiple linear regressions. Individuals with high attachment avoidance scores engaged in less seeking social support and confrontive strategies, and in more distancing strategies to cope with partner infidelity. Alternatively, individuals with high attachment anxiety engaged in more accepting responsibility and escape avoidance strategies, and less positive reappraisal strategies to cope with partner infidelity. These findings advocate potential therapeutic interventions for individuals coping with partner infidelity, including helping clients understand the ineffective coping mechanisms that arise from their attachment patterns and supporting them in challenging their cognitions and adopting more effective methods of coping with partner infidelity. Although the study was able to predict the types of coping strategies insecurely attached individuals are likely to use when coping with a partner's infidelity, it did not directly focus on the impact this had on participants’ psychological distress. Future research using mediator analyses could offer interesting information into the complex relationship between attachment, coping, and psychological distress, and shed light on whether specific strategies may increase an individual’s vulnerability of developing mental health difficulties in response to a partner’s infidelity.

No description available.

In recent years in both academia and in many western governments, ‘Nudge’-style interventions have been tested and applied to various policy areas including public health, road safety, and saving domestic energy. Often these have been successful in terms of changing behaviour, partly because the interests of the citizen-consumer (pro-self ends) and those of the environment/society (pro-social ends) are in convergence. Less research has been conducted into using nudges for solely pro-social behaviours. In this thesis I discuss the application of nudges to promote one pro-social behaviour: voluntary carbon offsetting for air travel. Testing nudges through randomised controlled trials and evaluating them through qualitative focus groups, nudges were found to have limited utility in promoting this target behaviour. Two explanations are proposed, one in terms of the design of the nudges, and one in terms of the substantive problems associated with this target behaviour. In terms of the design of the interventions trialled in this study, ‘too much information’ being provided, a ‘distant’ social norm message, and a lack of attention to ‘intrinsic values’ at the expense of more technical language may be barriers which pro-social nudges ought to avoid. Secondly and more substantively, it is argued that when pro-social behaviours are not perceived as ‘common’, are not ‘visible’ (i.e. others cannot ‘see’ them being done, and so they are resistant to the power of social norms), and they are associated with negatively-constructed ‘cousins’ (as carbon offsetting is associated with invasive ‘extra’ services), then nudges are unlikely to be effective. This is a key empirical contribution to the literature regarding the practical boundaries at which nudging may start to fail. These findings act as an empirical demonstration of the theoretical contribution of the thesis, which is a novel portrayal of the nudge paradigm as macro-libertarianism and micro-paternalism: a form of neo-liberal behavioural governance which is politically attractive, but is often ineffectual. The thesis concludes by arguing that when the interests of the citizen-consumer and those of the environment/society are not in convergence, nudging may be inadequate and tougher regulatory approaches, such as ‘budging’, may be necessary. Implications for both behavioural public policy and sustainable aviation are discussed.

For undergraduate populations, binge drinking is a common practice and risky drinking behaviours such as these have been associated with negative consequences for individuals and society. This thesis aims to gain a better understanding of young peoples’ decisions to binge drink using a social psychological perspective. Two online (N=229 and N=313) and one lab-based (N=122) longitudinal and experimental studies use quantitative methods to gather data on the binge drinking behaviour of undergraduate students at an English university, using questionnaires based on an expanded Theory of Planned behaviour (TPB) alongside experimental social identity interventions. The findings support the use of social cognitive models to the study of risky health behaviours, particularly the application of an expanded TPB to the prediction of undergraduates’ binge drinking showing that it can account for between 65 and 75% of the variance in students’ intentions to binge drink and between 44 and 60% of the variance in students’ self-reported binge drinking behaviour. Social identity variables (e.g. self-identity) played an important role in the expanded model suggesting there is scope for further improvements. Implications for future research, including further additions to the TPB model and suggestions for interventions to reduce risky drinking are presented.

This thesis addresses the subject of cultural participation, specifically attendance at cultural venues in the UK. This is a topic that interests sociologists, in terms of the social construction of cultural judgements, and how cultural consumption reinforces and perpetuates social stratification. It also interests cultural funders, in understanding who benefits from the public subsidy of cultural organisations. However, the relationship between cultural participation and geographical access to cultural facilities, a conceptually simple idea, has hardly been addressed in either of these literatures. Within geography there is extensive evidence for the significant effect of distance on use of public facilities. The differences in provision of public services or “spatial equity” that people experience according to where they live means that neighbourhoods act as “opportunity structures”. The empirical work in this thesis is presented in four chapters written as standalone papers. Nonetheless the thesis represents a unified piece of work, addressing common research questions, as elaborated in the conceptual framework and research design chapters, through four case studies. This thesis overall, and in each study, extends the explanation of cultural participation being driven by social stratification, to understand the effect of access to cultural infrastructure on participation. Using both survey and administrative data, covering Scotland and London, a range of analytical techniques and innovative accessibility measures are used to assess the impact of access to facilities on participation. The effect of access, as well as other spatial variables including access to public transport, commuting behaviour and competing destinations, are found to be highly significant, with comparable effects to the social stratification previously identified. These findings have important implications for cultural policy. Arts funders may justify the continued regional differences in levels of cultural funding on their support of the creative industries, which demonstrate spatial agglomeration. However, on the evidence presented here, it is not sustainable to continue to claim that the supply of arts venues has little effect on cultural participation (Marsh et al. 2010b, 112).

Social hierarchy is one of the most fundamental features of human social interaction and has important psychological consequences. How hierarchies function and impact psychological processes, however, varies across cultures. Social interactions in Korea are more hierarchical and collectivistic compared to those in the UK, which are less hierarchical and individualistic. This is reflected in the Power Distance cultural dimension (Hofstede, 1980, 2001), according to which the UK is lower on this dimension than Korea. Social norms enforce hierarchies such as deference, respect, honour and politeness which operate as an invaluable virtue in Korean society. The current research examines consequences of social hierarchy in the UK and Korea and asks the following questions: a) are there any differences between Korea and the UK in terms of how individuals' interactions are governed by the status of the interaction partner; b) how does the impact of rude behaviours exhibited by people occupying different ranks differ in Korea and the UK, focusing on the level of distress caused and individuals' evaluations of the perpetrator; and c) are there any differences between Korea and the UK in terms of how hierarchical relations are embedded in objective organisational prescriptions? Findings from Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that Korean participants' communication was affected to a greater extent by hierarchical relations showing that Korean participants wrote longer emails to decline a request by a senior colleague compared to a junior colleague; in contrast, the length of the emails written by British participants were not affected by the status of the recipient. Furthermore, across three studies (1-3), findings indicated that Koreans (compared with British) found it less stressful and more acceptable to be exposed to uncivil behaviours (rude and discourteous actions) of a senior colleague compared to a junior colleague. Study 4 confirmed that a similar pattern of hierarchical differentiation can be observed in organisations structured vertically (mirroring Korean culture), but not in organisations structured horizontally (mirroring British culture). Furthermore, in Studies 2, 3 and 4, mediational analyses showed that the observed cultural differences in reported levels of hierarchical relational stress (discomfort) can be explained by group differences in prescriptive norms (acceptability), but not by differences in descriptive norms (likelihood of occurrence). Finally, Study 5 examined how hierarchies are manifested in objective institutional regulations in the form of Code of Ethics adopted by Korean and British organisations. Findings revealed that relative to British organisations, Korean organisations endorsed Code of Ethics that places greater emphasis on hierarchical relations, consistent with prevalent cultural values and beliefs. Together, Studies 2 and 3 have highlighted cross-cultural variations in individuals' subjective mental representations of norms related to the behaviours of high and low ranking individuals and Study 5 demonstrated cross-cultural variations in how hierarchies are embedded in objective organisational prescriptions in Korea and the UK. I discuss the implications of these findings for literatures on social hierarchies/status, social norms, organisational behaviour and culture.

No description available.

People encounter a wide range of objects in the visual environment. Some of these are important and others are unimportant. Given that limitations on both attention and memory constrict people’s ability to process everything in an environment, they must somehow prioritize important over unimportant objects. One suggestion as to how people do this is that the contents of working memory (WM), likely pertinent to current objectives, bias attention to environmental stimuli with which they share features. This suggestion has received mixed support in the literature. The degree to which stimuli in WM bias attentional deployment may relate their task relevance, that is, their pertinence to one’s present activity. However, considering that emotional stimuli appear to command attention preferentially, this thesis asks how the presence of emotional stimuli, specifically expressive faces, bias attentional deployment. Research in the area of emotion-attention interactions suggests that emotions of different valence have distinct effects on attention. Positive emotion leads to a broader, more efficient, allocation of attention than negative emotion. Thus, emotion-related WM-attention interactions may result in distinct patterns of attention capture depending on the valence of the emotion involved. We tested whether this account describes the interaction between the emotion on a face held in WM and visual attention during the performance of a subsequent task involving emotional schematic faces. Consistent with expectations, emotion in WM influenced attention. Specifically, positive emotion led to a broader attentional focus than negative emotion. Importantly, emotion only influenced attention when it was task-relevant (Chapter 2). Event-Related Potential data indicated that when emotion was not task-relevant, participants processed WM-matching expressions more superficially than non-matching expressions, suggesting that WM-matching contents are dismissed more quickly when not task-relevant. Nonetheless, these stimuli interfered with visual processing; a result that may explain observed discrepancies in WM-attention interactions with non-task-relevant stimuli (Chapter 3). Finally, we extend the finding that positive emotion leads to faster target processing, to the concept of value. Here, we examined how the intrinsic value of an emotional expression related to its ability to capture attention. Research shows that people are willing to give up money for the chance to see genuine smiles. Thus, we hypothesized that a genuine smile’s subjective value would predict attention capture for genuine-smile targets in a flanker task. Results confirmed this prediction, suggesting that an expression’s intrinsic value also drives attention capture and may therefore have implications for how people navigate social interactions (Chapter 4). Together, these results suggest that emotion in WM biases attention in a manner that is sensitive to the demands of a current task. Specifically, whereas task-relevant positive emotion results in more efficient orienting of attention than task-relevant negative emotion, non-task-relevant emotion receives demoted priority in visual processing. These results extend to an item’s value, such that higher-value stimuli receive priority processing. This research extends our understanding of WM-attention and value-attention interactions to include long-term semantic associations as a factor. Collectively, the results of this research suggest that the allocation of attention to social stimuli is determined based on social implications, with positive implications having particular influence.

The voice contains a wealth of information relevant for successful and meaningful social interactions. Aside from speech, the vocal signal also contains paralinguistic information such as the emotional state and identity of the speaker. The three empirical chapters reported in this thesis research the perceptual processing of paralinguistic vocal cues. The first set of studies uses unimodal adaptation to explore the mental representation of emotion in the voice. Using a series of different adaptor stimuli -human emotional vocalisations, emotive dog calls and affective instrumental bursts- it was found that aftereffects in human vocal emotion perception were largest following adaptation to human vocalisations. There was still an aftereffect present following adaptation to dog calls, however it was smaller in magnitude than that of the human vocalisation aftereffect and potentially as a result of the acoustic similarities between adaptor and test stimuli. Taken together, these studies suggest that the mental representation of emotion in the voice is not species specific but is specific to vocalisations as opposed to all affective auditory stimuli. The second empirical chapter examines the supramodal relationship between identity and emotion in face-voice adaptation. It was found that emotional faces have the ability to produce aftereffects in vocal emotion perception, irrespective of the identity of the adaptor and test stimuli being congruent. However, this effect was found to be dependent upon the adapting stimuli being dynamic as opposed to static in nature. The final experimental chapter looks at the mechanisms underlying the perception of vocal identity. A voice matching test was developed and standardised, finding large individual differences in voice matching ability. Furthermore, in an identity adaptation experiment, absolute difference in aftereffect size demonstrated a trend towards significance when correlated with voice matching ability, suggesting that there is a relationship between perceptual abilities and the degree of plasticity observed in response adaptation.

People are guided by their emotions which in turn are a consequence of their understanding of others’ emotion expressions. Their skills to read and accurately identify others’ emotion expressions are a key ingredient for good emotion understanding. That is, accurate emotion identification can be considered as the first frontier of successful emotion understanding, and as the first step of a sequence which results in empathic responding. Impairment within this sequence might mean that the way people respond to their environment may not be appropriate or even cause harm to others. Children and adolescents with callous-unemotional traits have difficulties reading emotional cues correctly, specifically those cues which show others in distress. Such an impairment is thought to underlie a distinct pathway to severe and stable antisocial behaviour. Conventional methods of curbing the antisocial behaviour of children with high callous-unemotional traits such as punishment or time-out do not have the desired effect. Instead, this group of individuals seems to respond well to parental warmth and sensitive responding. Given that children start to learn early how to read and respond to emotions in an empathic manner through interactions, parents have a potential role by intervening early to foster good emotional and social skills even in children with high callous-unemotional traits. Study 1 tested whether adolescent boys with high callous-unemotional traits exhibit an impairment that is specific to distress cues such as fear, sadness or pain as difficulties to recognise such cues in others may impair typical inhibition to behave in an antisocial manner. In Study 2, it was expected that successful parental scaffolding is dependent on parent’s own emotion understanding skills, and therefore, study 2 investigated ways in which parents can scaffold emotion understanding in typically developing children, e.g. through talking about others’ emotion states and through engaging children in mutual eye gaze. Study 3 examined the impact that varying levels of child callous-unemotional traits have on parent-child interaction. Specifically, it was of interest whether children with high callous-unemotional traits are willing to engage with their parents on an emotional level permitting successful parental scaffolding. Parental understanding of emotions was tested in terms of promoting parental sensitive responsiveness. In sum, there are three main points the present thesis contributed: first, findings of Study 1 and 3 support a theory of emotion processing impairment that is not specific to fear or sadness, but describe a broader impairment of a failure to engage with the emotional environment and attend to salient emotional stimuli. Second, this thesis confirms the value of studying callous-unemotional traits in adolescents and young children as well as their parents. Third, findings of Studies 2 and 3 support the important role parents play in the lives of their children with callous-unemotional traits, specifically through their own emotion understanding.